Demon Night (2 page)

“So this cowboy walks into a bar—”

To Charlie Newcomb's relief, a chorus of male groans drowned out the rest, and her automatic
Please, God, kill me now
response died after
Please, God
. There were days she'd rather stab a cocktail umbrella through her eardrum than hear another “walked into a bar” joke.

Thanks to the group of bachelors roosting at the end of her counter in Cole's Hard Time Bar and Grill, this had just become one of those days.

“No, wait. Wait!” Her tormentor's voice was abnormally loud, but Charlie knew it wasn't just the drink. He'd been obnoxious before she'd set the first reduced-calorie beer in front of him. “It's a good one.”

“Stevens, you dumbshit, there's no such thing as a good one,” someone said as Charlie began unloading the small dishwasher beneath the bar, and she felt an instant of hope. A possible ally existed among the assholes. “Yo, bartender lady!”

Charlie turned, flipping the highball glass in her hand to the rack near her hip. Her ally cocked a dark brow.

“More peanuts, Blondie?” He pushed a wooden tripod bowl through a pile of shells littering the mahogany surface and loosened his red tie with his opposite hand. “I have to fortify myself for the upcoming bullshit.”

Just lovely. “Sure thing,” she said. Her sneakers crunched over the floor. How had they gotten the shells on this side? Flicked them over when she wasn't paying attention? Gorillas.

“Okay, so this cowboy, he walks into a bar and sits down, right? And then he realizes that it's a gay bar, but he's real thirsty, right? So he says, ‘What the hell, I'll stay anyway.'”

Charlie was better than this Stevens guy if she didn't slam the refilled peanut bowl into his face.

Telling herself that didn't make her
feel
better.

“And so he starts to order his drink, but the bartender, he says…Hey, Blondie, hold on. You should do this part.”

Stevens's hand came perilously close to hers, as if he intended to detain her. Charlie paused in the middle of scraping the broken shells from the counter into a small wastebasket and gave him a Look.

She'd had to use it before. It was effective, that Look, even on drunks. A narrowing of her eyes, a tightening of her lips, and it said,
Touch me and I'll kill you
.

Or cut off their drinks, which was sometimes the more dire consequence. But Stevens and his friends weren't yet intoxicated—just warmed and loosened.

“Ah,” Stevens said, blinking slowly. His hand resembled a quivering mouse when he pulled it back to curl around his mug. “Do you want to do the bartender's part?”

No. But she knew from experience that a Look was one thing; outright rejection, another. Easier just to play along than risk them moving from obnoxious to belligerent.

“All right.” She set down the trash bin, wiped her hands on the towel tucked into her lap apron. God, how many of these things had she heard? Not many with cowboys, though. Mostly priests and rabbis. She took a stab. “So the bartender says, ‘Before I serve you a drink, you have to tell me the name of your penis.'”

Stevens's mouth didn't move much, but his eyes—slightly red, slightly watery—turned down into a frown. “You've heard this one.”

“Well,” Charlie said, suddenly wary. The two drinks she'd given him over the past hour weren't usually enough to inebriate a guy his size—but he might have been drinking somewhere else before meeting up with his buddies, and the alcohol was just now kicking in. “Yeah.”

“Fuck. You guys, she's already heard this one. That fucking ruins the whole joke. Forget this shit.” He tipped up his mug, looked down into it. Empty. “I need another one of these, Blondie. Try not to fuck that up.”

The clench of her teeth could have ground peanuts to butter. Like hell she'd serve him more.

“Yo, Stevens. Ease off, man. It isn't her fault.” Her ally. His tie now hung limply around his neck, but she managed to restrain herself from reaching over and yanking it tight again when he added, “Listen to her. She's sick or something. Couldn't get off for the night, Blondie?”

His tone was sympathetic, but his assumption scraped her already raw nerves, and the rasp in her voice deepened along with her frustration.

“No.” Charlie pointed to the jagged white line crossing the bottom of her throat. She'd ripped out the sleeves and collar of her Metallica T-shirt, and the resulting boat neckline was low; she couldn't believe they'd missed the scar. Unless she was wearing a turtleneck, she usually couldn't get new acquaintances to look at her face. “The Emerald City Slasher.”

His eyes widened; so did Stevens's and the others'. “No shit? Thaddeus White, right?”

She nodded. “Seventeen years ago. I was twelve.” Hopefully they were too loose and warm to recall that the Slasher had fixated on adult women, not kids.

“How'd you get away?”

“I had to saw through my ankle. Then I crawled to a neighbor's.”

“Holy shit.” The exclamation made the rounds, and two of the jerks actually tried to lean over the bar for a look at her legs. Did they think she'd pop off a prosthetic foot for them?

A throat cleared behind her. Her savior had come. Charlie turned; Old Matthew's determinedly solemn frown wrinkled his raisin-dark face. “You want to take that break now, Charlie?”

“God, yes,” she muttered and limped past him. Just before she reached the “employees only” door, she heard him telling Stevens and company that, when probed too deeply, the memories of the Slasher were liable to send her into a psychotic rage.

Good Old Matthew Cole. He'd likely have them gone by the time she returned—or at least moved to a table in the restaurant.

She grabbed her navy peacoat from the hook inside the break room, slid it on, and dug her knitted cap from the pocket before slipping out through the kitchens. The heavy length of her hair against her back annoyed her, but she didn't untuck it from beneath her collar. Trapped as it was between the coat and the wool hat, it'd be as flat as a one-dollar beer by the end of her break.

But flat could be fluffed; drowned rat could not.

Rain misted over her face and sparkled beneath the halogen security light. Cardboard wilted in the recycler to her left. The lid on the brown Dumpster was up. She grimaced, imagining the sodden garbage, and tipped it closed. The clang shot through the alley, disturbing a yellow-striped cat and echoing in her ears until she reached the gated stairwell to the roof.

The gate was wrought iron, with a metal screen to prevent anyone reaching through the bars to the interior knob. As a safety measure, only the outside knob locked—if someone dropped the key over the side of the roof, they could still open the gate from the inside.

Every Cole's employee had access to the key, but Charlie was one of the few who used it, even when—as now—the air was cool enough to nip at her face, but not enough to make her shiver. Luckily, in Seattle, extremely cold days were as rare as a perceptive drunk.

The top of the stairwell was dark, but the light above the bar's kitchen door shined through the gate, casting shadowy diamonds against the rough brick wall. Charlie ran lightly up the stairs, her feet slapping tinny chimes from the aluminum treads.

In the middle of the roof, a few potted plants edged an Astroturf carpet and surrounded a porch swing better suited to a verandah in Savannah than atop a bar in the trendy Capitol Hill neighborhood. Small firs from a Christmas tree farm flanked the swing's support posts. A white string of lights spiraled around the evergreen branches, though the holidays had passed four months earlier. Steam floated from the ventilation hoods over the kitchen and caught the streetlights in front of Cole's, then dissipated as it rose. The scent of grease and fried potatoes it carried did not fade as easily.

Old Matthew called the roof garden his little piece of Heaven; when Charlie had utilized the sand-filled planter that doubled as an ashtray at the end of the swing, it had been hers. Still was.

She'd kicked the habit, but the scene was too good not to revisit. Though the old movie theater across the street obscured most of the downtown skyline, there was just enough glitter to offer a lovely view.

The chill from the seat soaked through her black cotton pants, but the canvas awning had kept it dry. A push of her foot sent it swinging, and she fished her cell phone from her coat. For the space of a few seconds, the rocking tempo perfectly matched the ring of the phone.

Jane answered on an upswing. “
Char
-lie.”

Charlie's brows rose. She'd heard a couple of men say her name like that, but never her older sister. “I'm just checking to make sure you haven't forgotten about lunch tomorrow.”

“Nuh-uh. I wrote it on a sticky. It's stuck on the fridge at home.”

“Fridge” was kind of a moan, too. Charlie unwrapped a piece of gum—not the square kind anymore—and folded it over her tongue before she said, “Actually, I wrote it. You just stuck it.” At home? “Are you still at the lab?”

“Yeah.”

Charlie rolled her eyes. “Did you remember to eat today?”

“Uh-huh. We ordered in. Sushi. And wine.” A giggle came through the earpiece. Jane didn't giggle.

“You're with Dylan,” Charlie guessed. “Isn't this why you moved in with him? It still shocks me that Legion doesn't dock you both for…what's the word? It starts with
F
.”

“Fraternization?”

“That's good enough.
With
the regional head,
while
you're at work. Isn't there a policy against that kind of thing?” It seemed like there should be, but Charlie couldn't be sure; both the corporate and academic research worlds were mysteries to her. Jane's descriptions of internal politics, red tape, and the hoops she had to jump through at Legion Laboratories could have been set in another universe.

“Nuh-uh.” Breathily. And her ridiculously articulate—if absentminded—sister was spouting two-syllable nonwords.

“Oh, Jesus,” Charlie realized. “You're fraternizing him right now. Naked?”

“Almost.”

Charlie tried not to imagine that, even though Dylan was…well, yummy. All dark hair and eyes and sinful lips. But he was her sister's, and they were so cute together. “Why didn't you say something?”

“I couldn't decide if that would be more awkward.”

“Nerd. You didn't have to answer the phone.”

“It was you.”

“Aw, that's sweet. Except now I feel dirty.”

“Imagine how I feel.” The dry tone was familiar—it was
Jane
.

Charlie grinned at the phone. “Alrighty then. Try not to be naked at noon.”

“I'll try.”

That ended on a bit of a scream, and Charlie hastily disconnected. The call time flashed up at her from the backlit screen: fifty-six seconds. Her smile faded.

Adding in the minute it had probably taken to come up here, she had thirteen minutes before she had to return. Shit.

She should have brought a book. Or her knitting bag. How long had she been relying on Jane being available when she needed a distraction? God knew Charlie had been dependent enough in her life; she should have recognized the signs by now.

But she shouldn't be feeling this envy. If anyone deserved happiness, it was Jane. Charlie didn't know if Dylan deserved her sister, but if Jane was happy with him, Charlie would be, as well.

With effort, she forced away the self-pity—that emotion was addictive, too.

She rocked a little harder, let her head fall back against the cushion, and closed her eyes. Why had she let a guy like Stevens get to her? She never had before. She didn't know why she was so tense of late—or why she couldn't shake the certainty that she was constantly under observation. Surely after two months, she couldn't blame her paranoia on nicotine withdrawal.

At least she could be confident that no one could see her for the next ten minutes. Determinedly, she occupied herself with a game of pinball on her cell phone until she heard a swell of laughter and voices.

Charlie left the cover of the swing and looked over the low wall at the front of the building toward the Heritage, where an old-fashioned marquee declared it “James Stewart Month.” Groups of twos and threes spilled from the theater's doors, many of them folding their collars up against the rain.

The second show must have ended earlier than usual, or there'd been a problem with the projector—Old Matthew always scheduled her break before any theater patrons straggled in.

Most of the moviegoers turned right, walking down the sidewalk toward Harvard Street and the parking garage. One large group of twenty-or thirty-somethings, males and females in tailored trousers, long, belted coats, and chic haircuts, headed straight for the bar. None of them carried umbrellas, but many Seattle urbanites viewed them with disdain—as if getting soaked honored some sacred Cascadian tradition.