SUSPENSE THRILLERS-A Boxed Set (45 page)

Humming to herself, Charlene started in, all the while the thought of the strawberry dessert in the back of her mind, making her mouth water.

She did not again see the skulking figure at one of the windows.

Chiefly because she forgot to look for him.

Thirteen

Shadow saw the man come in. He was there to catch her act once . . . sometimes twice a week. He sat alone, nursing a drink, his face inscrutable. For some reason she knew he was after her. She wondered if all women knew it when men wanted them, wanted some kind of relationship, lusted for them. It didn't have to be something in the eyes. The stare could fool you. Nearly all the men who came to a titty bar stared and lusted. Not all of them would really act, given a chance. But this particular man would, she knew that by picking up the invisible signals coming from him. It was the way he moved across the packed room, trying to keep her in view if he happened to come in when she was already on stage. And in the way his hands clasped around the cup on the table before him, the fingers laced together as if he didn't trust himself to raise the drink to his lips without a firm grasp. The way he was honed in on her, like a radar beam, tracking even the subtle moves of her flesh that some of the others missed because they were glued on her breasts or the G-string snaking between her buttocks.

This man. He worried her. Something about him didn't match the regular clientele. The way his sports jacket hung, maybe, or the cut of his hair, or the depth in his eyes, as if he were thinking something unfathomable and not easily put into words.

She finished a dance and walked off the stage to the curtains. Two dancers stood there sharing a joint. One of them was a lush, too, and Shadow thought she was a sloppy, careless dancer, a real slut. The other one—Mad, she called herself—was young, with a pimply ass, and cool gray eyes the color of wet stone.

Shadow said. “Who's that guy out there, the one in the brown tweed jacket? He comes in a lot.”

Mad made a slit in the curtain with long, curved red nails. “That's a cop. Samson. Not Vice, though. Homicide, I think.”

“Cop!”

“Oh, sugar, he don't mess with us,” the lush said, letting out a rush of thick heavy smoke and handing the roach to Mad. “He's got this thing for the girls. He seems to like watching. There's lotsa guys like that, all walks of life, even cops. They're human too, ain't they?” Then she laughed and choked and reached for the joint. It was Mad's song coming on. She had to hit the stage anyway.

Shadow shrugged, not interested in more conversation with the older woman. She noticed as she moved past her to the dressing room that one of the hag's nipples was puckered, the brown tip bending oddly to the left, like a bent wire. Ought to see about that, she thought. Might be a tumor working. But she would never say that to the old dame. Her nipples were her business.

The girls all dressed in the same long narrow room where a row of scarred wooden benches ran along a counter set into the wall below mirrors that stretched to the low ceiling. Shadow was finished for the night. She jerked out the bills in her purple G-string, counted them. Ninety-six dollars. She turned the tumblers on the combination lock that secured her locker, pulled out a small black purse, and added the bills to the wad inside. She had made three hundred or so tonight, a good take, very good.

The cop in the tweed jacket never tipped her, never came near the stage. Sometimes the bartender handed the girls tips that men left with him, shy men afraid to reach out to dancers on stage, so maybe the cop paid them that way, but she wouldn't bet on it. There was something about him—nothing to do with him being a cop—that made her leery of his attention.

She stepped out of the G-string. Damn thing set her back sixty-five bucks. They sold dancer strings and bras and see-through jackets at a booth just outside the dressing room, but the stuff was cheap, gaudy, and too expensive. This purple thing was one of her first purchases, before she knew where to buy what she needed at a little shop down the street from the club. The G-string was already fraying around the elastic at the waist where the purple sequins were attached.

Shadow laughed and threw it into the gym bag she took home with her. How was she going to become a class act in bits of sequin and elastic that wouldn't last through a week?

Dressed in black slacks, a black silk pullover, and black jacket, she shouldered the bag, her purse, slammed shut the locker door, and twisted the combination. Dancers were notorious thieves. They'd stolen two outfits, a hundred and fifty dollars, her lipstick, and an expensive, waterproof mascara, before she remembered to lock everything up tight the minute she hit the dressing room.

In the hall she pushed past Dawn—an eighteen-year-old whose hair was bleached white as snow —and rounded the corner for the back exit. Outside in the alley, she looked around for lurkers and perverts, saw the cop coming from the front street entrance, and felt her heart catch.

Goddamnit, what did he think he was doing? She talked to no one. Dated no one. Slept with no one. This was business, her dancing, not a leg up to prostitution, the way it was for other girls, and she'd be damned if she'd let some cop come messing around.

She turned sharply and hurried to the back parking lane behind the building, unlocked the door of the Toyota and jumped behind the wheel. As she turned the key in the ignition and fired the engine, she glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw him rounding the corner, making for her. She slipped the transmission into drive and left just as he raised his hand to flag her down.

Jesus God. What did he want with her? But she knew, deep in her woman's heart she knew. It had nothing to do with police work. It had to do with want and need and the illusion, all the things she was not willing to deal with again, maybe never again in all the rest of her life.

~*~

Mitchell stood with his hand raised in the air, feeling foolish. “You damn fool,” he said, then grunted in disgust at himself.

He watched the brake lights of her car blink as she turned into the street, vanishing beyond the many-storied buildings on the block. An errant breeze slipped around the corner and licked at his cheeks. It smelled of Chinese food and hamburgers on a grill and burnt coffee. It smelled like the city on a lazy, lonely, late-spring night.

Whatever had possessed him? He didn't talk to the girls. He had never before followed one outside to the parking behind the club, hoping to flag her down.

And if he'd succeeded, what would he have said? “I'm crazy for you. There's something about you that pulls me like a magnet. I can't get through a week without seeing you. Why are you dancing naked this way, demeaning yourself to those scumbags? You've got to stop it!”

He rubbed his chin, feeling the stubble growing there since he'd shaved early in the morning. This was all wrong. He was dropping like a wet sack of cement into a morass. This obsession that made no sense in his life. He should have been doing something worthwhile, not hanging out waiting for Shadow to get off work. He had cases—a case load to kill a workhorse!—that he could have been working. He had people to see, places to go. Didn't he always?

Yet he was acting like some lovesick son of a bitch, some wacko like those stalkers who fixated on girls, complete strangers, hoping to find a way to make a connection. He needed a shrink.

He didn't need a shrink.

He needed . . .

He wanted . . .

To hell with this shit, it was making him crazy. He had a murder to investigate—a gay bashing that had gone the dreadful limit, poor guy found in a trash bin with his skull crushed to pulp. Someone on the street would know something, might have seen something. They hadn't found the weapon, but the ME said it was probably a tire iron or length of pipe or wood they took along in the trunk of the car and disposed of later. He didn't have the tissue samples analyzed yet. He'd know soon if it was metal or wood.

The victim didn't go down easy. Bruises laced both his upper forearms, and a half-moon bruise rode one hip, as if he'd been kicked. With that kind of resistance, someone might have heard him fighting for his life.

And that's what Samson had to find out.

He had to stop slipping into alleyways at two in the goddamned morning trying to talk with a stripper.

He had a job to perform, bad as it was, depressing as it made him feel, hopeless as it sometimes seemed.

He turned and moved from the alley to the street, blinking at the lights, the car horns, the giggles of teens breaking curfew who gave him wide berth as he stepped onto the sidewalk. He thought maybe he'd find Big Mac and see if she had something for him.

But before leaving the club behind him, he couldn't help one last quick furtive glance at the framed poster advertising SHADOW, THE NEWEST RAVE, and felt his heart leap and settle sick in his chest, lonely for her, sorry she was gone where he could not follow.

~*~

She thought she saw someone in her headlights as she drove too fast down the brick circle drive to the mansion but, just as the figure appeared in the heavy fog, it disappeared, and she decided she had been daydreaming, the way she did sometimes when she drove.

She parked underground in the dark cavernous garage, thinking, we need to get lightbulbs down here, and hurried around the big building with the deep thick scent of the garage's packed damp dirt in her nostrils. She ran up the wide marble steps leading to the second-floor front entrance. She had the keys out, the door unlocked, and was smiling before she saw Charlene in her blue slippers and housecoat, waiting with a dish of something strawberry in her hands.

“Are you hungry?” Charlene asked. “I made shortcake.”

“I can go for that.” She dropped the gym bag to the floor where she stood and took the saucer. She kicked off her shoes and glided to the leather sofa before the dead fireplace. The first bite was heaven. Strawberries and whipped cream brought a hungry moan to her lips.

“I did the floors,” Charlene said, standing over Shadow, hands hanging at her sides.

“They look great. Shiny and all. Why don't you sit down, take a load off? Aren't you eating?”

“I will later. I . . . I already had one. But there's plenty more'

“You're wonderful, Charlene. I could get used to treatment like this. I feel like a princess or something.”

Charlene bowed her head at the compliment. She took a seat in one of the big white cushiony chairs and crossed her feet at the ankles, hands in her lap. A content pose. Now that Shadow was here.

“I thought I saw someone outside when I was cleaning house.” Charlene's brow wrinkled as she reported this information. Her hands found one another and clasped tightly.

Shadow paused with a spoon of strawberries halfway to her mouth. She frowned. “Where?”

“Oh, at the door. At the windows. But I guess it was the fog playing tricks.”

Shadow thought about it. Charlene's nerves were not in the best shape in the world. Easily frightened, easily upset. But hadn't she too thought she had seen someone in the drive?

“When?” she asked.

“Earlier. Hours ago.”

“Is the door locked? Did I lock the door?”

Charlene started from the chair immediately, her slippers slapping pittypat across the marble to the door where she checked. Finding it unlocked, she turned the deadbolt and put on the chain. “There,” she said softly. “Safe.”

Shadow sighed, suddenly tired, the night closing down for those hours before dawn, her inner clock ticking slower and slower, her eyelids drooping even as she finished off the shortcake and licked the spoon clean. “We better hit it,” she said. “The dessert was great. Thanks for the calories, kid.”

Charlene took the saucer and spoon to the kitchen, a sincere and courteous “You're welcome,” trailing behind her.

Together they turned out the lights downstairs, checked the door one last time (Charlene did, just to be sure, she said), and went up the stairs to the bedrooms. Charlene turned to the left of the staircase, Shadow to the right.

“Goodnight,” Shadow called.

“Goodnight,” Charlene echoed.

Soon there was darkness in all the mansion and outside the fog moved conspicuously in waves and eddies against the barred glass.

~*~

Charlene swam from the black dungeon of sleep, where nothing disturbed her, to the shoals of wakefulness, just on the brink where reality was whatever she thought it might be.

His hands.

Bringing down the sheet, letting in the cool night to her uncovered arms and legs.

His fingers.

Lightly touching her gown, molding the cotton material against her breasts.

Her legs.

Pushed apart, the gown lifted, the air stirred by the balloon effect so that she shivered and swam closer to the surface where life might or might not be dangerous.

And then the weight!

And his breath staggering her senses, covering her mouth with a rough hand so that she was forced to breathe him in, his sweat and old-clothes smell.

Charlene woke completely into terror, frozen on the bed, someone, SOMEONE on top of her body, pressing at her.

His voice.

Shushing her. Quiet, quiet, he said, I can kill you if I want to, if you scream, if you move, I can take your eyes, I can break your neck, I can strangle you in a second, quiet now, still, lie still, I won't be long . . .

A total frenzy. Charlene coming apart. Flying apart like shattered glass. Splintering with a scream that drove his hand down her cheek to her neck where it tried to hold her fast to the bed. But she was too insane for him, too scared to care if he killed her, too willing to die rather than let him take her as she'd been taken before.

The scream was a long interminable screech from one dying, and grateful for it.

His hand slipped, sweaty, from the meat at her throat and plunged down into the pillow behind her head. He tried pinning her down again with his hips, his knees on either side of her, but she was wild with panic, driven to an explosion that made her physical form twisty as a snake, whipping back and forth to dislodge him, to shatter his existence. He lurched forward and down, forehead striking her teeth, blood from the gash spraying out over her face in the dark. His hat flew from his head, was lost; one of his shoes was knocked from his foot and clattered with a bang onto the floor.