Sacrificing Virgins (15 page)

But Wes's reach was longer. He held the shovel like a baseball bat, and as Arachnid lunged, he brought the heavy side around, and all those years of Little League paid off—in a spade. The metal tip of the garden implement connected dead on with a clang against Arachnid's skull. But this time the singer didn't just go down.

This time the shovel cleaved his skull just above the ear. Maybe it was because the generations of Brood he'd fed had weakened his skull, or maybe it was because Wes swung that shovel damned hard. But the top of Arachnid's head came off as clean as a Tupperware lid. With a slight pop.

As it did, a cloud of black wings filled the air, and the world was alive with the drone of an angry, surprised hive.

The Brood.

As the droning black bugs swirled into the air, a cloud of larger insects poured like smoke from the trees all around, and Wes was pummeled by legs and wings and chittering, buzzing smacks of bug.

The Swarm.

Wes dropped the shovel and ran.

He'd only gone a few yards when he realized…the swarm wasn't after him. They hadn't followed. The yard sounded like the inside of a beehive, but when he looked back he saw the center of activity. Arachnid's head.

More precisely, Arachnid's brain. The swarm…was feeding.

There was a pain then in his own head, and Wes felt dozens of tiny teeth biting. Something pushed through his ear canal, and legs pricked across the lobe of as it crawled out. He swatted the side of his head.

His hand came away bloody and black.

“Oh God,” he cried, and slipped down to his knees. His stomach threatened to puke. These things were really alive
in his head
! Then he felt the creepy plucking feeling again, and this time he didn't swat. There was a piercing cicada buzz, and a small black bug flew past his face. And then another. And another. They were leaving!

His brood was going to join the swarm. For dinner.

He stifled the gorge in his throat, and his whole body shook with horror as he forced himself to remain still, kneeling, and let them go.

When he got home that night, Wes took his Eardrum Buzz CD and threw it in the garbage. Then he reached for something older. Safer. He popped in a The The disc and sat down on the couch.

“Infected with your love,” Matt Johnson began to sing.

“Uh-uh,” Wes said, and hit the
Power
button on the remote. The stereo went dead.

“No more infected with your anything,” he said.

As he lay back on the pillow, he realized that the drone in his head was finally gone. Mostly.

It was actually so quiet he could hear the silence.

It buzzed.

Field of Flesh

Everyone knows the saying: Only the good die young. But the corollary is, only the bad live forever. And to crib from another really well known pop song, forever is a really long time.

I'm a neutral party. Or at least, that's what I always said. Call me a voyeur if you want. I call me a private dick. And I don't mean in the sense you're probably thinking. My dick
is
private, but I meant that in the parlance of 1950's noir movies.

I watch people.

I find out their dirty secrets, and bring them out of the closet and home to roost. And no, I'm not normally the purveyor of a cavalcade of clichés, but those timeworn phrases are perfect to illustrate my profession. I make money by watching people…usually people involved in nefarious activities.

The people who will live forever.

So I didn't blink when the woman in front of my desk said she wanted to pay me a retainer to go a sex club, find her husband and bring him home. It was not
exactly
something I'd done before, but I'd been asked to do stranger things. And been paid well for it.

In this instance, the setup was intriguing. I was to be a “white knight” in the dark cellars of kink. Apparently the client—who introduced herself as Patricia Delacruiz—had been attending a super exclusive bondage club called NightWhere for the past few months. Every month, she and her husband Lucas would receive an invite delivered to their home a couple hours before a session was to occur, with instructions on how to find the secret club. Because NightWhere, apparently, was never held in the same location twice.

Smart setup, I thought. Keep the lookie-loos out and the local constabulary off your back. Before any of the locals knew any wiser the club would have come and gone. So to speak.

“Here's the thing,” Mrs. D informed me, with fingers entwined nervously on her lap. She was wearing a short black dress, and I could see the top of a garter belt holding up the black pantyhose she wore. I suspected I was meant to see that, so I ignored it. “They have a room where they torture people, and never let them leave. They have my husband, Lucas locked up there, and now I don't receive any invitations to come back to NightWhere, so I don't know where they are. I can't get back to the club to find him and get him out of there.”

“Well, if you can't get back there, how am I supposed to?” I asked. Yeah, I know I'm a private eye, but…that doesn't mean I always want to do things the hard way. I wanted her to help me out a little. One thing I've noticed—people are usually more resourceful than they give themselves credit for being. I never pass up a little help.

“That part's easy,” she said. My ears perked up at the word easy. It's a word I like. Eggs over easy, The Big Easy, women who are…you get the picture.

“I know a couple who go to NightWhere every month,” Mrs. D said. “If you stake out their place at the right time, you could get their invitation, and use it to get in.”

“Well,” I said, thinking this one through. “That seems like a sound plan. But why couldn't you just ask them to take you? Or stake out their place yourself and snag their invite if they won't? It would be cheaper than hiring me.”

“Because the doorman at NightWhere would recognize me. He'd know not to let me in. With you? You'd be a newbie, and they always have a few new recruits every month. He won't recognize you, but you'll have an invitation, so he'll think you're one of the newbies. So you could get in, find your way to the Field of Flesh, and set Lucas free. They'd never suspect what you were there for, until it was too late.”

“Field of Flesh?” I asked. I wasn't sure I liked the sound of that. I tapped my Bic pen impatiently on the notepad. So far I hadn't written anything beyond a sketchy list:

sexy dame

easy

bondage club

find NightWhere

Call Tommy to see if bowling is still on for Friday night.

I needed to fill in the blanks on this assignment and then hussle it over to the bank to make sure her check cleared.

“Yes,” Mrs. D said. “The Field is the place where they take people to torture inside NightWhere. You'll have to look for it, but carefully.” She chewed her lip before continuing.

“The Field of Flesh is kind of the last resting place in NightWhere for voyeurs.”

“So Lucas was a voyeur?”

Mrs. D uncrossed her legs, and then crossed them again, with her opposite foot now on top. She made sure to give me a long look at the shadow above her garters before settling back in the chair. She smiled, two cherry-red lips moist and full of promise.

Whatever she was promising, I didn't want. Except as it applied to money. Payment in cooch didn't pay my rent. As enticing as it may have been. From the sounds of it, she wasn't just second hand goods at this point; more like sixty-second-hand.

“He liked to watch,” she admitted, dipping her head a little. I could almost imagine that she blushed. “He
really
liked to watch me.”

“Hmmm,” I said. “And now they've locked him up in the voyeur's prison?” I said. “What's he watching now?”

“He can see everything that goes on in NightWhere,” Mrs. D said.

“From what you've described, that sounds pretty good for him. What's the downside?”

“He can't ever leave.”

“Maybe he doesn't want to,” I suggested.

“I've seen him in my dreams,” Mrs. D said. “I know he wants to come home. They're milking him dry.”

I chose to ignore the dream comment. I could have found a few choice barbs to puncture that. But somehow the picture of a guy watching scads of people doing all manner of sexual things, and the phrase “milking him dry” struck me as too funny to pass up.

“A guy's gotta rest between milkings,” I said, trying to keep my lips serious. My face betrayed me.

“It's not funny,” she said. “If you can't get him out of there, I'll never see my husband alive again.”

I slapped myself mentally, scribbled a note, and then told her my price. She didn't blink, and handed me my upfront money—$500—in five crisp Benjamin Franklins. She provided photos of her husband, the address of her kinky friends, and the knowledge that invitations seemed to come mid-month and usually midweek. Since it was a Monday and the thirteenth of the month, I figured I should start a stakeout at the friends' house in about thirty minutes. They may already have gotten an invite…but chances were, it would be turning up over the next couple nights. I was already mentally making a list of things I'd need to keep me occupied in the car for the next few evenings, as I watched their mailbox. I had a
Victoria's Secret
catalogue already stashed in my glove box, but I had a feeling that this case was going to need something stronger. A bag of Doritos and a stack of
Busty Babes In Naked Peril
magazine (I was a lifetime subscriber) was going to be more like it.

The invitation came on Thursday. I almost missed it—though I'm not sure how that happened (although I have to admit, the
Busty Babe
on page 134 did hold my undivided attention for several ecstatic minutes)—I never saw who delivered it. It was around 5:30 p.m. and I knew that within the next thirty minutes, one of the two would get home from work, so just to be safe, I got out of the car (parked halfway down the block) and took a walk to wake myself up for the next couple hours of stakeout. If they didn't receive an invite by 8 p.m., Mrs. D had said, there wouldn't be one.

As I was passing their house, on a whim, I reached out to unobtrusively open the mailbox. I'd checked earlier, after the post office truck had swung by, and all they'd had was an advertising circular for a chimney sweep and what looked to be a credit card bill. I hadn't seen anybody walking on the block for the last couple hours since.

Still…

My impatience was rewarded, because on top of the junk mail, was a bright red envelope. I slipped a finger between the loose end of the back flap and slit it open. An invitation was inside, as I suspected. It said very little, though every letter appeared to have been fingerpainted in bloody red on white paper. The text was obscure, but I knew what it meant.

You asked for it.

You have this chance to get it.

Come to 69 Angle Ave. in Riverside tonight at 9 p.m.

Be there.

—NightWhere.

I folded and pocketed it after making sure nobody was out and about and watching. Then I got the hell out of Dodge.

More clichés. Sorry. I watch a lot of old movies when I'm not watching philanderers, perves and perps.

What does a guy wear to a sex club? Especially when he doesn't intend to have sex? I pondered that quandary for several minutes, and finally decided on a pair of faded blue jeans that looked weathered but not ragged, and a black button-down shirt. Part of me considered opening the shirt buttons extra low and donning a gold necklace, but honestly, I don't have the thick black chest hair to pull off the disco-stud gimmick and I hadn't been able to stomach
Saturday Night Fever
even when it was hip. I couldn't mimic it even with irony implied now.

I pulled on my favorite pair of leather boots, and slipped my secret weapon into the custom scabbard on the top of the left one. I didn't know what I was walking into, and I sure wasn't going to go there unarmed. Since I wore my black shirt untucked, I was easily able to hide my little Kimber Solo in the back pocket of my jeans. If they patted me down at the door, they
might
find the little handgun, but I was betting on not.

Booted and armed, I stood and looked in the bathroom mirror for a moment. I didn't hate what I saw. A little weathered maybe, but I hadn't let too much beer go to the gut. And there was still a feathering of dark hair across the dome. The furrows that hundreds of nights on stakeout had helped carve gave me a man-of-the-world look, I thought.

I'd probably get hit on tonight, I mused. Although, from what Mrs. D had told me, I wasn't sure I wanted the attention. Whips and chains looked great in glossy, tawdry magazine photoshoots, but I had no desire to feel the reality of their painful welts on my couch-conditioned skin.

Still, before I left the bedroom, I stopped at my nightstand and pulled out a square foil pouch with a rubber raincoat inside. I slipped it into my right front pocket.

Be prepared
, the Boy Scouts had taught me.

I had a gun, a knife and a condom. What else could I possibly need?

I had a pretty good idea of where my destination was based on the address. Angle Ave. ran along the railroad tracks on the outside of town. There was a long stretch of small businesses, from auto mechanics to glass shops to lumberyards there. I had a pretty good guess that 69 Angle (I had to give them credit for their sense of numerical irony) was on the far side of the lake on the seediest outskirts of Riverside. That would certainly make the most sense. And Google Maps agreed with me. I backed out of my drive at 8 p.m. It was going to take me close to forty-five minutes to get over there, and I didn't want to be a latecomer.

Not that I expected (despite my right pocket preparation) to be a
comer
at all, in club parlance.

But I didn't want to be noticed as the guy who walked in last. I planned to get there on time, stake out my place on the wall, and then watch the flowers shuffle in. I'd do a little reconnoitering, get some hints as to the location of the Field of Flesh, and then slip out of the main club in the direction of that hidden room when the festivities were getting, shall we say, boisterous.

I noticed I was being followed about a half hour into the trip.

The headlights had been following me for some time…maybe all the way back to my apartment.

I realized after three or four turns that the same lights had consistently sat there in my rearview mirror.

I
was being followed? Wasn't that supposed to be
my
job?

Just to prove that I wasn't being paranoid thanks to my profession, I pulled off on an abrupt right turn into a small subdivision of beat-up old ranch homes. At the first stop sign, I turned left, circled the block and then exited back to the highway at the same spot I'd entered.

The lights stayed with me through every turn…though I noticed they faded back quite a bit.

When I pulled back onto the main road, it was only a few seconds later when the beams of my pursuer's headlights flipped out of the subdivision and resumed their path behind me.

Hmmm.

Who would follow me? Well…I supposed there were any number of potential “who's” out there. Open any file in my wide three-drawer file tower and you could find a couple people in every manila folder who had a reason to stalk me back.

Strange thing was…none of them ever had before now.

Hmmm, indeed. I decided the only course of action was to maintain my course of action.

The highway turned left and began to follow the edge of the bay. The businesses and buildings along the route dropped away until there was only a business sign every thirty seconds or so.

I watched the address signs though, as they slowly slipped down from 1500 Angle to 900, to 330, to 102 and then, just ahead, on the Bay side of the road, I saw a lone outpost.

The mailbox at the edge of its driveway read 69. Luckily, I'd already slowed down, anticipating that.

The lights behind me did as well.

Interesting. I shifted on the seat to feel the hard shape of the concealed handgun in my back pocket. Had the owners of the invitation witnessed my theft? Had the inviters?

I pulled into a long gravel drive that led back to a Quonset hut. It looked as if a giant coffee can had fallen on its side in the middle of an overgrown prairie. But despite the remote location, I was definitely not alone. There were at least three dozen cars scattered around the building.