Sacrificing Virgins (16 page)

My intent was to be unobtrusive, so I turned left before reaching the front of the metallic structure, and drove past several parked cars before pulling mine into an impromptu parking space. The tall grass scratched against my already tortured muffler as I slowed to a halt. I felt a twinge of concern over the beating my car was taking on gravel roads and weedy parking lots, but it was the lights in my rearview mirror that held my attention. My follower hadn't slowed when I pulled into the drive on 69 Angle. If anything, my pursuer pulled closer, and followed me right down the weedy path to pull in alongside. A silver Lexus. Nice—quietly confident money on wheels.

I popped my door open and stepped out; I wasn't going to be caught sitting down.

The door to the other car sprung almost before I was on my feet, and I saw the black lace of fancy, impractical headgear rise above the silver roof. And a cascade of equally impractical black locks flowed around it.

The head turned and I knew those dark eyes, even at three yards away in the dark.

“Patricia Delacroix,” I said. “You are following
me
?”

“Shhhh!” she implored, a finger to her lips. She darted around the car, and I saw that she was very definitely dressed for the occasion. Black silk dress slit up past her hip, it seemed, thin shoulder straps that only got thinner on their way down, leaving plenty of room for her more than adequate, um, assets, to be displayed.

Her legs were spidered in fishnet, and as she moved closer, I realized that her heels had to have been six inches long. She was looking down on me, the moon shining cold over her right ear.

She slipped an arm around my shoulder and leaned in to whisper. “If anyone sees us, we're together,” she said.

“I thought you can't go in?”

“I can't,” she said. “Not through the front door.”

She reached into her tiny leopard-skin handbag and pulled out a small business card. “But when you find him…I want you to call me. You might be able to let me in through a back entrance or something. And if not, I'll be out here, waiting for him.”

“You followed me,” I noted again. This time, she acknowledged it with a curt nod. “You might need me,” she said. “I had to be here.”

“I keep thinking that you don't really need me. You could handle this all on your own,” I said. But Patricia Delacroix only pulled me close, pressing my face into the soft crook of her neck and forcing my eyes into the open invite of her cleavage.

“No,” she whispered, pressing my face lower into that softness. As if smothering me with the thing she knew I wanted. “I absolutely
do
need you for this.”

With that, she pushed me away, and put a finger under my chin, forcing me to look up into her eyes, not down the line of her neck and into her…

“Call me when you find Lucas. If you can find a way to let me in, I'll be out here waiting. Now…just…get
in
there,” she said, pointing at the steel door of the Quonset hut. “Go find my husband.” She sniffed, and closed her eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath. As if steeling herself, forcing the emotion at bay. “I want my Lucas back.”

“I'll see what I can do,” I told her. “But from what you've described, it's going to be tough picking him out in a ‘field' of people.”

“Field of Flesh,” she corrected. “And you have his picture. Plus, they will likely have stripped him, so you'll be able to see his tattoo. I'm pretty sure that nobody else is going to have a tattoo of a man in chains stretched across his chest. It might take you a while, but you'll find him.”

She had given me a photo of Lucas's tattoo in my office. I had to agree with her. The tattoo of the chained man on his chest was striking. Especially since the detail work put the droop of the tattoo man's penis right onto the O of Lucas's bellybutton. I'm sure it looked better when he was younger, but now? That bellybutton was sagging. I guess that worked in the favor of the man in chains, but…

“Stay out of sight,” I warned and stepped back from her. And then I walked towards the front of the giant steel coffee can. My fingers stroked the invitation in my pocket and I felt increasingly nervous that they would identify me as an imposter as soon as I presented it.

When I reached the door, it was closed. A steel rectangle set in a steel half-oval…it was easy to think at first that it was not even an entrance. But I knocked; I could see the outline of the opening, even if there was no handle.

And a moment later my confidence was rewarded. The door cracked open. “Invitation?” a low male voice said from the slit of darkness beyond.

I held my red slip of paper out, and it disappeared inside the chasm.

The door opened, and a pale face peered out. “Come in, and sin,” the man said.

I had no intention of the latter, but I was happy to hear the invitation of the former. I'm sure I grinned a sappy grin and nodded, as I wholeheartedly, and yet falsely agreed, “Yes, I will!”

But I had no intention of indulging. I was here for one reason. And one reason only. To discover the room where Mrs. D's husband was being held naked, captive and presumably without his wishes (though I, frankly, had begun to doubt the latter point). All I wanted was for this job to be over and my payment to be propping up the balance in my checkbook.

At least, that's what I wanted until I stepped into what was known as The Blue Room of a club called NightWhere. Then I have to admit, I began to want the job to last a while.

The first thing that struck me once I was inside was the music.

It was pulsing throughout the black-walled rooms. I mean
pulsing
. I could feel the low end of the bass shivering the cuffs of my pants. I think my thighs shook. Not an altogether bad sensation…but weird. A band played some kind of dirgey, throbbing anthem up on the dark stage, and all around the room along the ceiling, tiny lights blasted blue glare onto the floor and walls of the place. But it wasn't the light or the sound that held my attention, I'll be honest.

It was the breasts.

Lots of them.

Without any attempt at concealment.

Beautiful, bouncing breasts. There were women all around the main lounge area of the club dancing and disrobing…or disrobing and dancing… And I couldn't look away. I was here to find a man, but all I could do was look at…

Mentally, I slapped myself.

Boobs wouldn't pay the bills. Even really bouncy ones with tattoos of flowers or skulls or Betty Boop. Though I saw those. And I certainly enjoyed watching them.

I walked past the bar and the dance floor and found myself in the super kinky zone, where a dozen men and women brandished whips upon people bound in chains, laid back on racks. I watched one woman, clad only in a black leather corset, twirl a wand with a half dozen leather straps on its end. She brought the tips of those straps in contact with an overweight balding guy's painfully white ass again and again, just barely lingering before pulling the straps away. With each stroke of the leather, he moaned as if in ecstasy instead of pain, though I saw the rising red trails on his pale flesh from her attentions. Her hand moved in an easy figure eight in the air, bringing the pain, then quickly teasing away before returning to slap again with six separate tongues a second later.

I leaned back against a black pillar and smiled. The air around me reverberated with the techno sounds of the darkwave band (they were playing on a small stage near the bar) but was also colored by the moans of dozens of people in the throes of various carnal pursuits. I felt as if I were standing on the set of a really dark, kinky porn film. In fact, I would never have guessed that a place like this existed outside of a prefabricated, calculated movie set. But this was inarguably real. A full frontal assault on sight, sound, smell and libido.

As titillating as the show was, I couldn't spend too much time enjoying it. The night was short, and somehow, I needed to strike up a conversation with someone who would know what and where this “Field of Flesh” was. But Mrs. D. had warned me to be careful. The Field was not something that the general populace of the club had any knowledge of, and those that did might be suspicious of some newbie asking about it.

It was like a poker game where I had some cards but they had not been dealt in an easy straight. More like an almost full house that needed the Jack of Hearts in the next deal or I'd have to fold and go home penniless.

There I go with the bad analogies again.

Anyway, I forced myself to look away from the woman wearing a Saran Wrap bikini (the plastic made her nipples stretch unnaturally wide, like a pair of lips pressed hard to a window). She was kneeling and bobbing her head at the waist of a man in pinstriped suit (who wears Armani to a sex club?). I walked back towards the bar. A good investigator listens, before talking. Observes before diving into action.

I needed to hear some of the patrons—and I don't mean their moans of passion. The bar seemed the most likely place to pick up some easy information without having to probe too obviously. People talk at bars. Though I had to wonder why anyone in a place like this would be sitting at the bar for very long. There were definitely more interesting places to be in at this club.

“Well, hello stranger!” The bartender was on me before I'd fully gotten my ass on the stool. I looked up and saw two astonishingly round but proud breasts jutting over the bar in my direction. Twin Xs of masking tape covered her nipples, but aside from that, all the woman was wearing was a cascade of startlingly blonde hair and a skirt made solely of threaded beads. She tantalized the male eye with what showed briefly behind those beads with every step or bend she made.

“My name's Sin-D,” she continued. “I'll be your server for the evening. What can I get for you? Cock-tail, or cock-tease?”

“Are they mutually exclusive?” I asked.

That brought a smile from between two cherry-red lips. Sin-D nodded. “We're going to get along just fine.”

I ordered a whiskey on the rocks and when she returned with the glass, her lips were swollen in an exaggerated pout. She set the glass down, ice clinking and threatening to slosh over at the top. Then she pointed at a trail of liquid that was dripping down the side of one creamy, perfectly complected breast. Her skin looked smooth and unblemished as freshly fallen snow. “I spilled some of your booze on my boob,” she complained. “Could you lick it off? I hate to waste good liquor. Or the chance for a good licker.”

She leaned over the bar, and suddenly I had that beautiful boob right in my face. What could I do but kiss it? So I did. Her skin tasted like booze and vanilla, and I felt my concentration swoon. I could get lost here, I thought, still tracing the curve of her femininity with my tongue. Sin-D pulled away and winked. “You wanted both, so you got it,” she said. “'Tail and Tease.”

“I think I ordered the wrong kind of 'tail,” I mumbled.

She leaned forward and licked the tip of my nose with her tongue. “Bad boy,” she said. “If you want that kind of cock-tail, you'd better finish that drink and get out on the dance floor. This is the waiting zone, stud.”

I nodded, but she was already moving away to help another customer. I could see the bare cleft of her ass revealed, twin globes shaking between the beads of her skirt as she walked down the bar.

Something stirred at my left, and I turned to see a cloud of black hair bending down over the stool next to me. A woman. She was setting a handbag on the ground, and when she straightened up, and slid onto the seat, I realized that she was a striking, if painfully thin woman. She might have been ten years older than me, or not. It was hard to tell. While her facial complexion was pure above the faded leather dog collar she wore around her neck, the skin of her arms and shoulders, and of the part of her back that I could see where her thin black dress dipped low, were crisscrossed with chicken-scratch scars. She looked weathered, but still desirable.

“Hey,” I said as she settled in.

She raised an eyebrow and brushed back a strand of kinked raven hair from her forehead. “Hey,” she answered. Her tone didn't invite further discussion. Her breath sounded rushed, as if she'd been running.

“Who won?” I asked.

She gave me a blank stare, and I thought the brown of her eyes held deeper mysteries than I ever wanted to plumb.

“The race,” I added to clarify. “You sound like you've been running.”

“Just wanted to get in here before they locked the doors,” she said.

“They lock people out?”

Her eyes brightened, and she looked me over more carefully. “You're a virgin, aren't you!?”

I shook my head adamantly. “Not since I was twenty-seven.”

“Didn't you read your invitation?” she asked. “If you don't make it here by ten, you're SOL. Everyone gets in, they throw away the key, and…”

“…then somebody yells ‘Let's party like it's 1999',” I finished for her.

She gave me a piqued look. “Something like that.”

A chipmunk-cheery voice and two bouncing breasts suddenly were back on our side of the bar. Sin-D leaned down, elbows on the bar with her hand on her chin. “What are ya havin'?” she asked my new friend. “Bloody Mary…or just blood?”

The thin woman gave her a “you can't be serious” look and then finally answered. “Alcohol first, blood later. Tequila Sunrise?”

When Sin-D turned away to mix the drink, the woman turned to me. “How are you with a flogger?”

“Inexperienced,” I said. “I'm more of an observer.”

“Figured,” she said. There was an element of disgust to her tone that I couldn't miss. She downed half of the Sunrise as soon as Sin-D set it in front of her.

“Just remember,” she warned. “If you spend your life watching, your life will pass you by, unlived.”

“Is that from
Famous Quotes, Volume Two
?” I asked. My sarcasm was not appreciated. She cracked the glass down on the bar and stood up. “People who refuse to learn are doomed to remain dumb.”