“She’s what?”
“Scared. There was a stripper killed not too long ago at one of the clubs. Outside one of the clubs. And another girl was just attacked. She had all these, ah, suits made up and decided she didn’t have the nerve to hang around and sell them, so I said I would.”
“What makes you such a brave little girl?”
Grrrrr. Temple hated condescension, even coming from potential serial sex killers. “I lost my job, so I guess I was just desperate. Anyway, I’m glad to see that the clubs have security experts like you working to keep us all safe.”
She apparently had hit the litany of buttons that made Rafi Nadir resonate like a choir boy singing soprano, or ring like a slot machine that had just coughed up three cherries in a row.
“Don’t you worry. This creep’ll get caught.”
“You sound pretty certain. Any reason?”
He leaned close. Even with this “quiet” table, the grinding rock music was always pounding the edges of your attention, flattening them like tin.
“I was there.”
“There?”
“In the parking lot of this one club. Secrets. Some guy was with Cher Smith. I stopped them to make sure it was on the up-and-up.”
“And —?”
“He cold-cocked me. Moved faster than a whipsnake. I don’t often take a hit. Cher drove off. I think he followed her.”
Temple frowned. She’d heard this story the other way around. Oddly, Nadir’s version jibed with Max’s, except….
“That was the killer. She was dead in another strip joint parking lot the next night. I saw the killer. That’s why I come back and hang around, even though I’ve got a better job elsewhere. I saw the guy. I’ll see him again. Guys like that don’t stop.”
Temple was speechless, probably the best thing she could have done.
Nadir was setting up Max to be the killer. If Molina could ever overcome her extreme prejudice against crossing paths with Nadir, that’s the story she would get out of him and it would give her everything she’d ever wanted.
How ironic.
“Now don’t be afraid.” Nadir reached out to pat her hand. He didn’t. His own closed over it, trapping it against the slick tabletop. “That’s why I’m here. I saw the guy. He wears disguises, but I’ll know him again.”
“How do you know you will?”
“Because I did see him again. That girl who was attacked outside Kitty City? I was there too. He got away. Some dumb-ass undercover narc bitch was there and blew my one chance to nail the guy. I had him in my reach, but she held a gun on us both. She arrived just after I came on him with the girl down. She couldn’t tell which one of us was the real killer so the stupid…broad let him get away, and forced me to go after him.”
“Did you get him?”
“No. He had too big a start on me. He can disappear like Lance Burton, this guy. But don’t worry, unless you see some guy over six feet tall. That he can’t quite hide. Tall guy. You look out then.”
Temple nodded, sober despite the kick-lime margarita. She could swear that Nadir believed his own story. But then, pathological killers always had some self-justifying notion.
She pulled her hand from under his to pick up the big glass bubble of the margarita glass in both palms and drink from the rock salt-slathered rim.
Her lips curled at the caustic taste, even as her skin crawled.
She had either just heard the twisted spiel of a stone-cold killer, or there was more to these murders than Max, Lieutenant Molina, and even Rafi Nadir knew or was telling her.
“So where’ll I find you tomorrow night?” he was asking, as if she’d want to be found by him.
Maybe she did.
She leaned in to whisper one word to him.
Shadows
Matt couldn’t help thinking about computer hackers as he stepped out of the small WCOO office into the empty parking lot.
You never saw them, hackers, but they came knocking on your cyber-door, and huffed and puffed until they blew your house down. Their only motive was spite, pure and simple. They didn’t have to know you to hate you. They struck and ran, leaving your entire system slowly eating itself. They were thugs, vandals, cyber-stalkers.
Kitty was like that. Maybe, like hackers, she took pride in mindless destruction. It was more fun to ruin a stranger than an acquaintance. Some poor Job who stood there naked and bleeding, asking the universe, “Why me?” Evil without motive, logic, gain, was more unsettling than all the seven deadly sins combined.
Letitia had left a few moments before him, at his insistence. He said he had to be a “big boy.” Basically, he had to make sure she wasn’t with him in case Kitty showed up.
He’d ridden the Hesketh Vampire tonight and every night since she had accosted him and Letitia in this very lot.
The Vampire was one sleek, shining, silver gauntlet thrown down on the empty black asphalt. She wanted to play motorcycle nightmare on her Kawasaki, he was ready to play back.
He figured they were pretty well matched. He had the anger and she had the nerve. Anger could betray you, of course, but it also was a fearless motivator.
He unlocked the cycle, took the helmet off the handlebar, put it on, donned the leather gloves, mounted, kicked the stand up, balanced all the bike’s awesome weight on his boot-toes for a moment before throttling up and cruising down the smooth asphalt.
He was alone except for the shadow he cast in the pink-grapefruit-color parking lot lights high on their standards, like artificial moons stuck on fence posts. Pumpkin heads on scarecrow stalks.
His shadow was a lowrider, a sidecar running alongside the Vampire’s high-profile bulk. The motor throbbed like hard-rock music, guttural and insistent, announcing itself to the night.
There was no way to be subtle on a motorcycle. It was an instrument of the self-advertised, married to a machine. I am inhuman. Hear me roar.
Overweight people, outcast people, overcontrolled people all found freedom on a motorcycle.
Matt wondered if that was why he had hated the Hesketh Vampire at first: too flashy, too noisy, too look-at-me.
Now he thought that he had been the too-too one. Too modest, too quiet, too self-effacing. Was that what had drawn Kitty O’Connor to him? Bullies always needed a victim, and a bully was what she was. Motorpsycho nightmare.
He watched his side mirrors. The helmet muted sound; it was like cruising inside a noisy silent movie, the familiar cityscape sliding by, sometimes at a pinball-machine tilt.
And then it was there: the black ball of a gadfly in his right mirror, moving up fast.
He tilted, swept left down an unknown street. Then right, swerving. Skating the dry warm streets, bike and man moving to a Strauss waltz, like the space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
It was past 2001 now. It was past odyssey and into obsession.
He rode for the sake of it, for the oneness of it, only visiting the mirror now and then, finding the black spot clinging to him like a burr, but still a block or two behind.
What did she really want? What could she really do? Try to crowd him off the street into an accident? She didn’t want any accidents to happen to him. She wanted to happen to him. So…if he wouldn’t rattle, would she rock and roll? Quit? Give up? Just enjoy the chase and drop out?
He had nowhere to go. Nowhere to lead her. She knew where he worked and lived. She didn’t know a thing about his internal landscape, except what she guessed or hoped to produce.
There was a strange freedom in deciding she could do him no harm, that she was trapped by wanting to harm him in certain limited ways.
She was gaining on him. He didn’t particularly care. Maybe he’d spin around in a 180-degree stop. Wait for her. See what she’d do.
At least it was just him and her. No innocents in the way. Did she understand that trapping him alone with her was not the threat; it was trapping him with someone else?
Yes, or she’d never have brought that poor girl along to the Blue Dahlia.