The Love-Haight Case Files (37 page)

Thomas tried to move methodically, but quickly. He didn’t want to leave Dagger on his own for long, just in case trouble arose, but he couldn’t see well enough as he moved along the first row of large cages to see what was inside. He still had to concentrate hard when using his night vision. Were they fighting rhinoceroses? Had Steven Spielberg sent these mooks a couple spare Velociraptors?

Thomas heard a smacking sound as he passed one of the cages at the end of the first row. He took a deep gulp and phased through the bars, in the hope of getting a look at whatever made the noise. At just the right angle, the metal wall of the side of the cage reflected a bit of the meager light edging through the cracks of the bay door twenty feet away. In the dim light, he saw the cause of the sound. A ghoul sat huddled in the corner of the cage, its face covered with dark, gooey blood. Flecks of skin and muscle clung to its lips, and veins squeezed between its sharp teeth as it tore off another piece of meat from the human arm it was gorging on. The fingers wriggled and stretched while the ghoul feasted on the dense muscle of the forearm, as if attempting to grab the ghoul’s face, but only reaching and twisting some of its stringy hair.

Zombie meat. Since the arm was moving and was not attached to a body, the ghoul was eating zombie meat, and the zombie wasn’t going to go quietly. Thomas imagined the fingers clawing at the insides of the ghoul’s mouth as the ghoul finished his meal, grabbing hold of the tongue and hanging on so as not to go down the throat.

These bastards weren’t just fighting dogs, they were fighting OTs against each other. Ghouls vs. zombies. Dog-faces vs. werewolves. Vampires vs. fey. A quick look around the rest of the room confirmed his conclusion.

He fled the room in terror. No matter how vile and depraved mankind was, somebody always found a way to take it up a notch, to make the world sicker and more disgusting than could previously be imagined.

He phased back through to the other room and found Dagger sauntering around, conversing with a few more of the owners, maintaining his cover. He floated next to the big guy’s ear, ignoring the fact that the position put him at eye level with a biker-type wearing a leather vest over a deeply tanned and muscled chest bearing the tattoo visage of a snarling Doberman and the words “And They Called It Puppy Love …”

“Car. Now!” Thomas hissed.

Dagger nodded, but took a few moments to finish the conversation, rather than breaking it off midsentence. Then, he strolled casually toward the door to the arena room and at an agonizingly slow pace through it, to the doorway they had first come in, stopping a moment to thank the guy who had let them in for his help.

It was all Thomas could do to keep himself from materializing until they were out of sight, back in Dagger’s Charger. He generally waited to talk until fully visible; it somehow creeped him out to think of himself as a disembodied voice.

When he did materialize, Dagger gave him a look-over. “Jeez, Thomas. What the hell? You’re practically diaphoretic. I didn’t know your type could get sweaty and breathe heavy. You look like you’ve seen a …” He stopped. “What did you see?”

“They’re not just fighting dogs,” Thomas practically shouted. “They’re fighting OTs.”

The phone on the center console practically vibrated off to the floor as a shriek and an “Oh my God!” emanated from the tinny speaker. Evelyn had stayed on the line the entire time they were gone.

Dagger’s face tightened and Thomas suddenly realized the private detective had more of a five o’clock shadow than he had noticed earlier. “You mean like those damn cage street fight championships?”

Thomas looked at Dagger. The detective’s lip was curling, just above the eye tooth on the side of his mouth facing Thomas. “Yes … and no.”

Dagger gave a growled shout. “What the hell does that mean? Yes or no?”

“Er … I mean, yes they are going to fight them in cages, but not like boxers or mixed martial arts. I don’t think these fights are voluntary, and I think they’re to the death … or to the ‘final’ death for the OTs that are undead. All the OTs were in cages … like tiger cages at the circus. I couldn’t see the occupants in most of them, but I think they are fighting various types of OTs against each other. Vamps, zombies, werewolves, imps, demons, ghasts … whatever they’ve got.”

“Werewolves?” snarled Dagger.

“I think so. I couldn’t see very well, but it makes sense out of what I did see and what you heard about the dog fights not being the main attraction. Feys battling each other won’t keep a dog-fighting crowd entertained for long.”

Evelyn’s voice on the phone interrupted Thomas’s tale. “I’ll call Phillip and 911, then get Animal Control on the way.”

“Not yet,” Dagger barked.

Evelyn’s voice quavered as she replied. “But we can’t let them fight!”

“We won’t,” stated Dagger. “But Animal Control won’t take care of the OTs. And the cops can get a bit over-aggressive in a fire fight not involving any innocent civilians … at least any human civilians.”

Thomas understood Dagger’s point, but what choice did they have? “You can’t take on all those guys, yourself.”

Dagger looked over to Thomas as he fished out his keys. “I’m not going to. I’ve got friends. We just need to go get them.” He turned the key in the ignition and the Charger roared to life. He grabbed the cell phone. “We’ll call you back later, Evey.”

“Can’t you just leave the line open? Who are you getting to help? Where are you going?”

Dagger flashed a toothy smile as he responded. “There’s some things you don’t need to know about me, Evey. This is one of them.” He snapped the phone shut before she could reply.

Dagger jinked the car in gear, then turned to Thomas before letting out the clutch. “If I drive fast are you going to travel at my speed or are you just going to phase through the back of the car as I accelerate and be left in the dust?”

Thomas hesitated. He didn’t know. He could only float through things at a moderate pace and, since he couldn’t touch things, he wasn’t sure how the car would help. On the other hand, he had gotten onto a cable car with Evelyn one time after court and managed to keep up, although he hadn’t thought about the issue at the time. Finally, he just threw up his hands. “I’m not sure,” he admitted.

“I’m not either,” replied Dagger as he revved the engine. “Focus on the car as we travel. It might help.”

Thomas narrowed his eyes, staring at the dash of the car.

“If we get separated, you can meet me at The Guys’ Warehouse, near the airport. You know the place?”

“I’ve seen it. I know where it is.” Thomas had always assumed the place was a Texas-sized strip club or gay bar … this was, after all, San Francisco. Either way, he could understand why Dagger might not want to share his destination with Evelyn. Thomas didn’t care if Dagger was gay. He didn’t care if Dagger hung out in strip clubs, either. Thomas wasn’t sure, though, whether he was going to be comfortable accompanying Dagger in either case.

The things you do for clients. Even
pro bono
clients.

Dagger broke Thomas’ reverie. “Then either hang on or catch up when you can. Time to get some muscle for this fight.”

Dagger popped the clutch and the Charger bolted from its parking space, tires spinning, rubber burning, engine red-lining between rapid, smooth shifts as the car sped into the night, Thomas somehow managing to stay aboard, thinking once more about whether ghosts could actually hurl.

Chapter 4.8

If it wasn’t for the garish neon depicting martini glasses and the words “GUYS’ WAREHOUSE” in ten-foot-tall pink letters, outlined in sci-fi green, the large, boxy building with a couple of acres of parking would look just like any other warehouse near the airport. Of course, most warehouses had several acres of asphalt for parked semis and trailer trucks backed up to lengthy loading docks. This one had acres of parking overflowing with parked cars and other vehicles, including an oddly high ratio of pick-up trucks and 4
x
4 Jeeps and other off-road vehicles. There were even a half dozen recreational vehicles—perhaps parked there by curious tourists, but, Thomas guessed, more likely the working homes of prostitutes who trolled the club on a regular basis. After all, a moveable den of inequity was cheaper, safer, faster, and more private than going to a nearby motel or mixing it up in a car or out in the parking lot. Faster being most important; in the sex trade, time literally is money.

Thomas gritted his teeth as Dagger swung into the lot with a vicious right-hand turn, tires squealing as the Charger fishtailed at speed, accelerating alarmingly toward the front entrance of the club. Thomas couldn’t, of course, hang on, but he also couldn’t feel the g-forces from Dagger’s rough handling of his ride—not that the kaleidoscope of light and color spinning across his field of vision, jerking and whipping with abrupt changes in direction, didn’t still terrify and nauseate him. Dagger didn’t even attempt to find a parking place, ignoring even the bevy of handicapped spots empty and forlorn in the first row of the lot. Instead, Dagger braked the powerful Dodge to a screeching halt at a haphazard angle mere feet from the front door, causing the beefy bouncer/doorman to leap away from the entrance, landing in a sprawl on the concrete sidewalk. The bouncer’s fashionable clothes took the brunt of the damage, and he came up swinging, but Dagger had already exited the car, jumping lithely over the driver’s side door and skidding across the hood of the vehicle to burst through the glass double-doors leading into GUYS’ WAREHOUSE. The bouncer came at Thomas instead. Thomas flinched as the professional brawler’s heavily-bejeweled fists swung in roundhouse arcs at his head and abdomen. But, of course, nothing could touch him, not anymore. Once he realized he was in no danger, Thomas shrugged his shoulders and gestured, palms-up at his attacker in an attempt to say “Hey. I’m sorry.” For all Thomas knew, he actually said those words. The throbbing techno beat blasting out of the closing doors to the club made it impossible to hear anything else.

Thomas rushed for the doors, in an attempt to slip through before they closed. Sure, he could just phase through them, but he still had the instincts of a normal person. Besides, he liked it best when he could pass as a normal person and not constantly reveal himself as an OT, as a ghost, to everyone within sight. It’s not that he hated OTs; it’s just that he wished he wasn’t one, wished that he hadn’t died.

A pale pink fey sat behind the barred window of a booth just inside the entrance ready to collect the twenty dollar cover charge and stamp the back of the hand of patrons as they came in. She was staring after the still rapidly moving figure of Dagger MacKenzie, as he moved through the throng of dancers and partygoers gyrating on the dance floor of the club, but her eyes flicked to Thomas as he entered. She paused for a second, and then just waved him through, tilting her head toward a sign to the right on the wall behind her: “No minimum, no cover for ghosts. We can’t stop you and you don’t drink, anyway.”

Thomas hesitated for a moment and chuckled. Finally, a perk for being an incorporeal remnant of his former self. But the moment quickly faded and he turned himself back to the task at hand: following Dagger to wherever he was going to get assistance in breaking up the dog-fighting and OT-fighting ring in the Tenderloin.

He rushed across the dance floor in Dagger’s wake, doing his best to wend and wind his way through the haphazard, shifting gaps between writhing dancers, rather than plow straightforward. He didn’t like to phase though people unnecessarily, and he suspected most people didn’t like the experience, either. It’s not that it was physically unpleasant for either of them, as best he could tell. It just felt like a violation of privacy, of personal space, like leaning in too close to someone to talk with them. You didn’t need to have garlic on your breath for that to feel uncomfortable.

Thomas had set himself an impossible task, though. The crowd was thick and undulating with a lack of any sense of propriety or inhibition. Bodies were surfing the crowd, the prone forms being passed overhead from group to group, hands pressing, touching, groping everywhere. The giddy, encouraging surfers whooped it up, with no effort to stop what was happening, merely reveling in the moment and doing their best to grab random drinks to chug as they were man-handled by the crowd.

The crowd was as varied and tumultuous and uninhibited and drunk as Thomas had ever seen, even when he went to Spring Break that one year on the Gulf Coast of Texas. The pulsing, apocalyptic abandon of the crowd was six times as dense and hedonistic and frenzied as anything shown on the late-night cable commercials for Coeds Gone Wild, and not nearly so dressed. And it wasn’t just coeds. Girls danced with guys, guys with guys, girls with girls, girls with groups, feys with vamps, ghasts with ghouls, dog-faces with pixies, and guys with naked cat-women … if you could really call what was happening on the dance floor “dancing.” As Thomas averted his eyes, he noticed a few zombies even shuffled at each other in a shadowy alcove near the long, mahogany bar that stretched the length of the room—almost two-thirds of the length of the warehouse. A swirling cloud near the ceiling might be the miasma produced by the smoke from cigarettes and marijuana tokes wafting toward unseen ceiling fans or it could be ghosts dancing for all Thomas knew. At least, he hoped they were just dancing. He couldn’t, thankfully, smell tobacco or weed anymore, and he didn’t really want to know anything about the dance or sexual proclivities or abilities of ghosts, even though he was one.

Thomas felt like he was drowning in a sea of flesh. He closed his eyes for a moment and put his hands to his ears, as if his incorporeal appendages could block out the thumping, atonal beat of the bass. He willed himself to float up eight feet, then opened his eyes and focused on Dagger’s back. The big man was just opening a door at the far end of the main hall. Thomas concentrated on the spot, stretched out Superman-style, and began to float at his best speed toward the door without looking elsewhere. He was momentarily taken aback when hands reached up to pass him along, like one of the body surfers, grasping at his arms and legs and torso, some deliberately grabbing at his privates as he sped along the top of the crowd. But, of course, the partying fondlers found no substance there. A disconcerting experience for both sides, no doubt.