This Case Is Gonna Kill Me (32 page)

He was staring at the girl going through a desultory bump and grind. She was decked out in cowboy boots and a fringed red bikini bottom, and her long hair clung to her sweaty shoulders and back. She leaned down and shook her breasts in the banker’s face. His only response was to blink slowly.

John leaned down and whispered in my ear, “You sure take me to classy joints.”

There was a woman bartender wiping down the bar. She was pretty in a sort of hard way, with long red hair pulled back in a ponytail and breasts that had cost her a fair bit. I had a feeling that not too many years ago she had been on that stage. It seemed like the owner of Hot Lips believed in job security.

We walked over to the bar. She gave the bar one final swipe. “Well, you’re not missionaries dressed like that, and I haven’t heard about any recent lawsuits. Jeb won’t hire runaways or anybody under eighteen, so you can’t be PI’s looking for a lost daughter. So what can I do you for?”

“We need to speak with Chastity Jenkins. Is she here?” I asked.

“Yeah, in the office going over the weekend accounts.” She picked up a phone behind the bar and dialed an extension. “Hey, it’s Ruby. There’s a couple of people out here looking for you.” She listened for a moment. “Guy and a girl.” She eyed John. “Make that a
gorgeous
guy and a girl.”

A few minutes later, Chastity Jenkins came through a door near the edge of the stage. She wasn’t what I expected. She was blonde (men do seem to pick a physical look and stick with it), but very petite. She had a good figure, big blue eyes that gave her a neotenous look, and a narrow upturned nose. There were a few wrinkles around her eyes and the corners of her mouth, but Botox had smoothed her forehead.

“Hi, I’m Chastity,” she said in a husky voice that had an odd little catch to it.

“I’m Linnet Ellery, and this is John O’Shea. Is there someplace where we can talk privately?”

“Sure, come on back to the office. Jeb won’t be in until nine. We’ll have the place to ourselves.”

We followed her past the stage, where the bored dancer was now eating a banana as she gyrated, and through a flimsy door. It seemed odd, given the bulk and heft of the other doors.

John correctly interpreted my frown. He leaned down and said, “You want to be able to hear if a fight breaks out.”

We went down a hallway past dressing rooms for the dancers until we reached the office. It was small and cluttered, but furnished with surprisingly comfortable armchairs. Then I realized that if you had to be in a place all night long, you probably wanted comfort. It also had a printer/copier/fax/scanner machine on the desk.

Chastity sat down behind the desk. “Okay, what can I do for you?”

“I’m an attorney from New York, a colleague of Syd Finkelstein.”

“Oh, Syd. I’ve tried to call him for the past few days, and he never calls back.” She gave us a brave but rueful smile. “I guess he’s given up on me, or at least on my hopeless little case, too.”

“Actually, no, Syd was hurt, and he’s been in the hospital. I’ve been helping out with his cases, and your case isn’t hopeless. You’re about to win it.” I took out the will and gave it to her.

Chastity read through it slowly. The farther she read, the more tears gathered in her eyes until they spilled over and ran down her cheeks. “He did it. He didn’t lie. Oh, Henry, I miss you so much.” The final words were a whisper, and she hugged the will to her chest.

John stirred and leaned forward. He gently worked the will loose from her grip. “Look, Ms. Jenkins, we think you might be in danger. We’re here to take you and your daughter back to New York. But first, can we use your machine?” He nodded at the multipurpose printer.

“Sure … go ahead … in danger?” She looked confused.

“Where is Destiny?” I asked.

“Who do you want this sent to?” John asked as he lifted the lid on the printer.

“David Sullivan,” I answered.

Chastity answered me. “She works at the Sephora cosmetic counter over at Penney’s.” I found myself reflecting that a degree in comparative literature wasn’t much of a career starter.

Chastity leaned down, pulled her purse from beneath the desk, and took out her cell phone. “She should—”

She never got to finish the sentence. There was the sound of high-pitched female screams and basso bellows that escalated into high-pitched screams almost indistinguishable from the women’s. Then came the
boom
of a shotgun blast and high-pitched yelping.

22

“Is there a back way out of here?” John demanded, grabbing Chastity’s wrist, while I lunged across the desk, grabbed the will, and crammed it back in my satchel. She shook her head. “Damn! Okay, stay behind me and when I say
run,
you
run
! Got it?”

We both just nodded mutely. We hurried down the hall to the door that led into the club. John pulled his pistol and paused at the door, hand on the handle, ear to the wood. The handle started to rotate. John stepped back, the door opened, and a werewolf confronted us. The beast and John were only the width of the door swing apart. John raised his arm, leaned forward, pressed the barrel of his gun against the creature’s forehead, and pulled the trigger.

Brains and blood flew out the back of the hound’s head. Chastity shrieked and started to collapse. I grabbed her under the armpits and dragged her in John’s wake. “Come on!” I screamed, and I could barely hear myself because my ears were ringing from the too-close gunshot.

The scene in the club wasn’t pretty. The banker was on the floor by his table with his throat ripped out. Ruby was firing her shotgun without a lot of thought about aiming. As we entered, I saw one wild blast hit one of the burly construction workers. He went down with a scream. Two werewolves were scanning the room. One of them spotted us and leaped up onto the stage. The door to the offices was just off the right side of the stage, and this meant he was closing on us fast. It also meant he could jump down on top of us.
He was going to have the high-ground advantage,
I thought, terrified by how fast the creature was bounding across the stage.

Chastity started to collapse again, and the sudden weight hitting my arm pulled me to the left. I threw out a hand to steady myself and hit the sound board and controls for the stage. The volume on the CD player went way up, the disco ball started whirling, and the pyrotechnics that had been embedded in the edge of the stage flamed to life—just as the werewolf gathered himself to jump off the stage and onto us. The rush of hot sparks whooshed up against the beast’s belly and set his shaggy coat alight. The sound as the hound burned was part human, part animal, and totally horrible. He began to run wildly through the room, biting at the flames and setting alight the tablecloths.

Another poorly aimed shotgun blast took down the disco ball. It hit with a crash and shattered. Another shot, and the mirrors on the far wall fell into pieces. I wasn’t sure which was more dangerous, the wolves swirling around us or Ruby and her shotgun.

The light from the flames meant I had a much better sense of what we were up against. It wasn’t encouraging. It was hard to get an exact fix on the numbers because the werewolves were moving so fast, but it seemed like there were three or four more of them. The fire alarm began blaring.

The other burly man ran for the door, but a wolf’s jaws closed on his ankle, severing his Achilles tendon. He collapsed with a wail, and the wolf landed on him, teeth savaging his neck.

John, moving with incredible speed and grace, leaped across the room and onto the back of the wolf attacking the construction worker. He locked his knees around the creature’s shoulders, gripped the elongated skull with one hand, jammed the barrel of his gun into the base of the skull, and pulled the trigger. Even over the bass beat of the rock song I heard the report. The beast collapsed.

A wolf came flying from another direction. I screamed a warning, but the beast landed on top of John, who lost his grip on his pistol. The gun went skittering across the carpeted floor. John rolled fast, and for an instant he had the wolf beneath him, but he gave a wild twisting buck and dislodged John. Then he was on top of John again. John had a grip on the creature’s head, struggling to keep those snapping jaws away from his face and throat.

Dragging Chastity after me, I ran for the gun. My eyes were watering from the smoke and the stench of burning plastic. It was getting hard to see, and the heat was singeing my exposed skin. Then, with a pop and a hiss, the sprinkler system came to life. Water ran into my eyes, and the strands of hair that had fallen across my face plastered themselves to my skin. I scraped them off and looked desperately for the gun, but I kept looking back to watch John and the werewolf. The muscles in John’s arms were like iron cords beneath the skin, his face was red, and his jaw was set in a grimace.
Where is that goddamn gun? What can I do if I can’t find the gun?

I looked back just in time to see John release his grip on the wolf’s head. I screamed. John, his hands moving so quickly they were almost a blur, smacked his palms hard against the wolf’s ears. The creature screamed and brought up his front paw to scratch at its ears. John flipped both of them over, placed his knee in the creature’s back, grabbed the wolf’s head, and gave it a sharp twist. The beast went limp.

John jumped to his feet. His nose was bleeding, and he had a cut on his cheek. “Run, run!” he screamed at us, waving his arms like a man shooing chickens.

Chastity and I ran for the double doors. John sprinted past us and slammed into the door, pushing it open. We stumbled through. A hound was right behind us. John gripped the handle and slammed the door into his snout. He fell back with a whine. I don’t know how John made that heavy door move that fast.

We started running across the parking lot heading for the car when Chastity collapsed and started having loud hysterics. John snatched her up, threw her over his shoulder, and kept running.

“What about Ruby? And that old man?” I gasped.

“They’re probably dead” was the cold response. He dug in his pocket with his free hand and emerged with the key. The car honked as he unlocked it.

“But—” I began.

John yanked open the back door and literally threw Chastity into the backseat. “I’m trying to keep us from joining them.”

I glanced back at the door to the club as a werewolf lunged out. I scrambled into the passenger side and hadn’t even gotten the door closed when John sent us roaring out of the lot. Sirens were approaching. A cop car, its lights spinning, went racing past us. We passed a fire engine. An ambulance, more cops.

“Where’s the Penney’s store?” John shouted back to Chastity.

“Mwwaaaaa”
was the ear-splitting response.

“Can you get sense out of her?” John snapped.

I slewed around in my seat to look at her, turned back around, and shook my head. “Probably not.” So I unlimbered my phone again, got the address, and keyed it into our GPS.

John took a corner almost on two wheels, and I grabbed for the panic strap. “Don’t get pulled over,” I warned.

“I don’t think we have to worry. Every cop in Roanoke is probably at Hot Lips,” he answered tersely. He had a point.

Ten minutes later, we were pulling into the lot at the mall. “I’m going to drop you at the door.”

“I don’t know what this girl looks like,” I said.

“How many people can there be behind the cosmetics counter?”

“Oh, yeah, duh. Sorry.”

He gave me a wan smile. “It’s okay. We’re all a little frazzled.” He rolled an eye back toward Chastity, still keening in the backseat.

“I’m sure as soon as I have time to think about it I’ll be in the same shape as her.”

“I doubt it,” John said as he pulled to a stop. “I’ll circle the lot and keep coming by to collect you.”

“Okay,” I said, and headed into Penney’s.

The door opened into the housewares department. I rushed past beds decked out with multicolored duvets and lace-edged pillows. I reached an aisle and glanced in both directions. There was no clear sense which way led to cosmetics. I randomly picked left and found myself in the infants’ and children’s department, where there were a surprising number of shoppers. Many of the women were pregnant, carrying babies, or towing toddlers. There appeared to be a baby boom underway in Roanoke.

I was getting a lot of weird looks, so I hurried past, looking for the women’s department, figuring Sephora would be located there. I found another aisle crossroads and took a look. To the right was hardware, with gas grills lined up like tin soldiers and lawnmowers, their bodies bright red or yellow, arranged like the petals on a flower. There were also shelves and shelves of tools. I saw five men entering from the mall side of the store. They didn’t seem like they were looking to buy a new chainsaw, and they had a look I had come to recognize—broad shoulders, necks as wide as their heads, shorn hair, and flinty eyes. I pulled back among the frilly first-communion dresses and continued my search, using the racks for cover.

As I hunkered down among the flounces, I tried to think. How to find the cosmetic counter? I drew in a deep breath and smelled the faint odor of perfume. I moved left and it faded. I moved right and it seemed like the scent became stronger. I decided to follow my nose.

Using racks for cover, I made my way to the other side of the store. I passed a mirror and got a glimpse of my face streaked with soot. No wonder people were staring. I had left my purse in the car so I didn’t even have a tissue to scrub it off. My only hope was to find Destiny before somebody alerted security about the madwoman in petites.

I pulled aside a couple of blouses and peered through the opening at the cosmetics counter. A beautiful black woman was behind the counter. In front of the counter, a fortyish woman sat on a tall chair getting a makeover. The woman applying the makeup was blonde, and while she was taller and not as buxom, there were enough similarities to Chastity that I was willing to bet she was Destiny.

I looked back and saw the big men walking down the aisle. I jumped up and ran for the counter.