SUSPENSE THRILLERS-A Boxed Set (61 page)

“Give me another Corona, will you?”

When the barman leaned over in a cooler, Samson saw Mac stroll past the window outside. “I'll be right back.” He snatched the files and hit the door, walking fast. “Mac!”

She turned, “My Hero.”

“Stuff it, Mac. Here, got something for you.” He pulled the twenty out of his shirt pocket and pushed it into a white vinyl pocketbook open in the cart. Where in the hell did she get all these strange old purses? She pretended not to see what he'd done. “How're you feeling?” he asked.

“Half dead.”

He peered closer, concerned.

“Oh, stop it. I feel great. Wonderful. Top of the world, ma!”

“You look feverish.” He reached out to press the back of his hand to her forehead.

“I look nothing of the kind.”

She felt all right. Maybe even too cool to his touch for such a hot evening. “You been taking the prescription? All of it? On time?”

Mac turned her back and started pushing the cart forward. He walked with her. “Well? Have you?”

“I am. I am. Such a nag. You need to apply for motherhood status.”

“That's my Mac. See ya around then. I left a beer warming.”

“Beer, hell,” she muttered, but he heard her as he walked away. “Women,” she said. “He's going back to look at the nekkid women. The pervert.”

Though she said it in a friendly, joking tone, and she knew he'd hear her, the observation bothered him just the same. Was he? A pervert?

But Big Mac was a bag lady who wouldn't take the offer of a free home. What the fuck did she know?

So he smiled, glad to be alive and drinking Coronas and puzzling over floaters found in the bay. Perverts never spent their time doing something useful, did they?

Besides, naked women were God's gift to the men of the Earth. You could dress them up and take them out, but au naturel was absolutely the best way to deal with a woman, say under the age of fifty.

Twenty-Six

The night after Son saw the cop talking to the dance girl, he returned to the Blue Boa, and hung out drinking draft beer. He didn't much like beer, but in a joint like this you had to drink to be able to abide the place. The girls on stage were sluts in G-strings, teasing strangers with their sex. Son watched them with a critical eye. A text of their offenses ran through his thoughts. Working in this kind of business. Drug addicts. Alcoholics. Prostitutes. Lesbians. AIDS carriers.

The girl who had been with the cop didn't dance. It might have been her night off. He signaled one of the waitresses over and asked, “Where's that girl, the dancer with black hair, the pretty one . . .” He hadn't forgotten her name. He just didn't want everyone knowing what he knew.

“Shadow? Oh, the Ice Queen's not coming in tonight. She comes in when she feels like it. If she's coming, she's here by ten or earlier. So she's not coming.”

“Ice Queen? Why do you call her that?”

The waitress turned down her mouth and shrugged. “That's what the other girls call her. Forget I said it, okay?”

“They call her that because . . . ?”

“She don't like screwing around with the customers, you know, that's all.”

“Ah, I see.” He put a couple of bucks on the waitress's tray.

He stayed just a few minutes longer then left for home.

The following night he was back again. He hugged the bar, watching the girls. Shadow danced her first number around ten-thirty. Son left as soon as he recognized her. He drove around for a while, ate a steak at a Luther's restaurant, then drove to the club again. He waited in his parked car, a half-block down the street from the Blue Boa's parking lot behind the building. At one-thirty Shadow appeared. He slouched down in his seat so as not to be seen. When she drove from the lot, he started the car, and followed.

He wondered, all the way across town, where she might be headed. She was the one he'd noticed parked in her Toyota two streets over from the Blue Boa the night a man parked behind her and left his car, getting into her car on the passenger's side. Then that man, the one who had been spotlighted in his headlights as he passed by, turned up as a floater. Cherkovania. An escaped con.

Son wasn't sure Shadow had anything to do with it until he had seen on the news that the man's car was found on the same street, in the same place he'd seen him park it.

His hunt had turned up the killer. Being in the right place at the right time and noticing things made all the difference. He had been rejoicing his good luck and powers of observation for days. Of course, she might not be actually doing it. She might be leading the men somewhere and someone else did the nasty work. But she was involved. She was definitely a part of it.

She lived this far from work? Fifty, sixty miles? Where the hell . . . ?

When she took a side street in the small seaside town of Seabrook, he waited in a convenience store lot until she was far enough ahead of him so she wouldn't know he was behind her. When she turned onto the road close to the water and then drove through massive wrought-iron gates and brick entrance columns, he slowly passed by, killed his lights, and coasted to a stop along the roadway. He got out of the car. Looked around. The few houses along this street were dark. Everyone sleeping. No dogs barking. They weren't going to see him.

He peered down the long drive that circled in front of a looming silhouette of a large house set back on a few empty acres right at water's edge. She lived here? In a place that looked like a boys' reformatory? Would anyone actually live here if he didn't have to? There were bars on the windows and doors of the three-story structure. How did she even afford the upkeep on a place like this? He didn't think strip dancing paid this well. It couldn't possibly. Could she be a rich girl, dancing for kicks? Did she have a sugar daddy? It just didn't compute.

He hiked down the drive, keeping off to the edge and out of the line of view from the front windows of the house. When he reached the steps, he saw lights going out inside. She was going to bed. He crept to the front door, listening for the sound of a guard dog somewhere. He cupped his hands around his face and looked through the grill on the double glass door.

Shadows intermingled and effectively hid everything from his scrutiny, except for the wide winding stairway leading to a landing on the second floor. Moonlight washed over marble floors like pale watery strokes from an artist's brush.

He'd have to come back. The dancer lived near the water, the same water where men had been found dead. She was called the Ice Queen; she didn't like men coming home with her and she didn't go home with them. Some kind of hang-up about sex?

Could she be the one?

Son crept back down the stairs and walked the long walk of the drive to his parked car. He had his hands in his pockets. He didn't smell the ocean breeze or hear the click-rustling of wind in the dry limbs of the tall palms. He didn't hear the crickets chorus or the bullfrogs croak in the roadside ditch or the plaintive call of a night bird. He didn't notice the moon, halved and hung in a clear starry sky.

He heard, saw, felt, and smelled nothing that interfered with his thoughts as he drove across the city again and home.

He didn't even hear his mother call weakly as he went to his room, down the hall from hers. He did not know, until morning, that she had needed him to help her to the toilet. And even if he had, he might not have gone to her.

He had too many important things to do to be sidetracked.

~*~

Charlene thought the cat helped keep the voices muted so she could think straight. She tried to stay wherever the cat was so she wouldn't go insane.

But she'd lost track of the cat. Couldn't find it. Hadn't seen it for hours.

“Kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty.” She called for it everywhere. “Kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty.” She looked for it in the usual hiding places. It liked to play with the floor-length curtains on the French doors in the side room facing the front porch. She looked there. Kittykittykittykitty.

She hunted for it in the kitchen, put out fresh Nine Lives food for it, but it didn't come. She went down into the forbidden (forbidden because she forbade herself to go into it) maze opposite the pool and walked in circles calling kitty, kitty, kitty.

Where was her cat? Shadow had bought her a cat. Where was it? Who had taken her cat?

The voices echoed all her words, mirrored them back inside her brain so that they doubled, so that reality shimmered, and still she hunted and she called and she began to cry, silently, wondering what might have happened to her little cat, her Blackie.

How she needed her!

It was a while before she heard the knocking at the door. When finally she did—a steady rap-rap —she hurried through the house to the sound. Someone might have found her cat and brought it home. Oh please let it be that.

When she reached the bottom of the stair landing and faced the front door, she could see, through the beveled and clear glass and iron bars, that a man stood there. She rushed to the doorknob and turned it, opening the door wide, and said breathlessly, “You brought my kitty?”

The man stood with his arm still raised as if about to knock again. His eyes opened wide and his arm lowered slowly, as if to move faster would frighten her.

“Well, did you? Where is she? Where is my cat?” In her brain the words echoed endlessly. Where is. My. Cat. Whereismycat. Whereismycat.

“I'm sorry, I don't have your cat, ma'am. I just came to see the property for sale. Have I come at a bad time?”

“Bad time? You don't have my cat?” Charlene spun, slamming the door in his face. She ran up the stairs again, hurrying down the hall to the bedrooms. “Bad time” echoed. Badtime. Badtime. Whereismycat? Kittykittykitty.

She found it in Shadow's room. Lying on the dresser near the silver tray with the two crystal high-ball glasses and the decanter of whiskey. The cat must have batted it during play and the decanter had tipped over, spilling the contents. A puddle of the poisoned liquor lay in the base of the silver tray like a still lake, amber in sunshine.

Charlene slumped onto her knees, clutching the dresser edge with her fingers. “Kitty, kitty?”

A new word echoed in her head. Dead. Dead. Dead.

She could not bear to touch it. She crawled from the bedroom on her hands and knees, found a closet door in the hall, and crept inside, shutting the door firmly behind her.

Maybe in the closet, in the stuffy darkness, the voices would stop.

Maybe they would.

Maybe.

~*~

Son drove down the circle drive, away from the mansion. The woman was completely out of her mind. Stone cold crazy. Where was her cat?

She was crazy, that's all there was to it. It was a pitiful thing to see. Hair all bedraggled and hanging in her face, those eyes wild with despair and skittish, just waiting for terrible news, her hands trembling. Why, she hadn't even dressed properly. She had on wrinkled baggy shorts, a tee shirt half in and half out of the waistband, and a ratty gray sweater—in the middle of a heat wave!—buttoned up all wrong so the sweater hung askew.

Who was she? What was she doing there? He had seen Shadow leave for work and he had wanted to find out if anyone else lived with her He wanted to know what the situation was in the house. He never expected to be met at the door by a raving lunatic.

He shook his head, perplexed. He leaned down and beat at the front dash, hoping he'd rattle something inside so the air conditioning would work better. He was sweating like a pig. The whole front of his shirt dripped wetly.

At least the crazy woman hadn't attacked him. He would have had to do something to her if she had tried. She needed something done to her. Something permanent. A person had no right walking around raving mad. It was like happening upon a mad dog, you put it out of its misery, that's what you had to do.

He had had a cat once. Pretty tabby. Sweet and loving, rubbing his legs all the time when he came home from school, lying across his books when he did his homework. Everything was fine until the cat grew up. When it was an adult, it hardly ever came near him. He'd try to pick it up to pet and it would hiss.

One time he was lying on the floor in the living room doing a page of math and the cat came over, curled itself in a ball near his arm. Without thinking, he reached out to stroke its fur. The cat leapt straight into the air screeching, and when it landed, it had its sharp teeth imbedded in his arm. He jumped to his feet and flung his arm down to rid himself of the terrible burning pain there. The cat maintained the tenacious grip. He screamed for Mother and again flung his arm as hard as he could. The cat was thrown across the room, hit the wall, and landed on its feet, scampering away.

After Mother doctored his wounds—and they were deep ugly gashes—Son went in search of the cat. He had a knife and meant to make short work of it.

He found it cowering in his room behind the bed. He stabbed it five times before it stopped trying to bite him. He didn't even bother to bury it. He walked out into the yard and heaved its carcass over the fence into an empty overgrown lot.

Son hated cats after that. And hated people who loved them. Like the crazy babbling woman in the seashore mansion.

How could Shadow stand it? What was the deal between those two anyway? Was the woman her sister? A relative of some kind? You couldn't put up with a crazy person unless you loved her and you had to. Even then it was bad.

Son took an exit that led to downtown. It was after ten at night now. She would be on stage, dancing her first dance.

He wanted to see again the face of the pretty woman who lived in a big rambling monstrosity of a house with a nutty fool. It was obvious the lunatic wasn't killing the men. Lunatics couldn't think straight enough to button their sweaters properly, much less commit murder without being immediately detected. He really had to see the dancer and try to understand.

Living with a burden made him think of his mother. She had not said a word about him being gone so much from the house lately. She had such forbearance. Such grace under duress. She would be all right, she would be fine, she said, go on, go ahead. And he went, guilt trailing out the door, hanging onto his coattail like a string attached to a kite.