Dancing With Werewolves (6 page)

“I’ll call,” were his last words.

Yeah. The elusive single male’s familiar dating and mating call, cited in many animal behavior books.

And I’ll see.

He will, girlfriend. I feel it in my bones.

Irma was playing Marie LaVeau now, the infamous New Orleans Voodoo priestess. That was the nice thing about having an inner girlfriend since before puberty; she could be multicultural.

I drove away with a pounding head, not even noticing where Ric Montoya had gone. But I had his number. Literally. Hooking up with a “just normal” guy would be great for a change.

Between the pulsing of every blood vessel in my head and trying to remember my way back to the Araby Motel in the dark, I didn’t notice anything different about me until I felt a telltale warm trickle between my legs.

Shit! I was either having my period off-schedule, which would be weird because I’d been on the Pill forever to control killer cramps, or I was really, really into Ric Montoya. Or vice versa.

Or maybe both, if they didn’t cancel each other out.

Oh, joy.

Chapter Ten

I woke up the next day and checked the Araby Motel’s scratchy sheets first thing.

My panties had passed the period test last night. No blood. My dreams had been vaguely gory, sometimes a prelude to my periods, but the sheets passed too.

No “virginal” spot of blood, m’Lord. She is fit to marry a King. Of course she could just be pregnant . . .

I sighed, trying to come to grips with my sudden new Sunset Park side: sexy chick.

I’d always tried to act like a hip modern girl, especially once I’d got out into the working world, but sometimes I thought I was an oddball escapee from some forgotten fairy tale. I didn’t remember a lot about my “wonder” years when things like hormones and periods and what guys might want appeared on the horizon.

Any shrink could tell you that never being adopted might lead to self-esteem issues. On top of that, my vamp-attracting coloring meant I’d had to stand up solo and secretly to the older bad boys who kept recycling back to the orphanage from foster home after foster home. All of them had long tails of initials in their case files, and half of them were OOW (out-of-wedlock) unwanted half-vampire spawn.

Every jaunt in and out of the institution just made them nastier.

Our Lady of the Lake convent school was a relief in

getting away from the bad boys, being a girls’ school, but

the other students all had homes and families and their own

venom-tongued ways of tormenting someone different.

By the time I hit college, working like a stevedore to earn living expenses, a social life was an afterthought. Somewhere, sometime after my institutional stays, I had the impression that I was no longer a virgin, in terms of not bleeding if you pricked me. Imagine how the fairy tale would have gone if Sleeping Beauty
couldn’t
bleed? But I didn’t remember when or how or who. Or what.

I also didn’t remember a couple of heavy drinking college parties very well either. Maybe then. Whatever had happened, if it had, I came out of it with memory loss, nightmares, and such an aversion to vampire lunges and to lying on my back that the dentist had to work on me sitting up.

During my last year at the group home, my dreams of a humiliating and terrifying “alien abduction” pelvic exam began, mixed up with vamp boy attacks. That drove me in high school to the underground drug sellers for the “others.” A lot of teen female werewolves had period difficulties during their “change,” and I could get the Pill without a prescription or a pelvic, since many doctors still wouldn’t treat supernaturals. No one ever questioned my supernatural credentials. They were selling meds like street drugs. Besides, who would want to masquerade as an outcast? All this shady rigmarole to get the Pill made me feel neurotic and squeamish and childish. From what I’d heard, women my age had abortions with less angst than I produced for a P.E.

So it wasn’t that I didn’t want male company or affection or that I didn’t dream that someday my prince would come. It’s that the dreams I remembered were always of a huge pale stingray hanging over me. I couldn’t breathe . . . was I underwater? Being held underwater?
Being held down?
A lot of working women had that dream. The stingray’s flaccid white wings were arched and veined like a bat’s, and became a black shadow above me, diving down, smothering me.

So I had some sexual hang-ups. My mind veered away whenever my thoughts wandered too close to the mystery. But it wasn’t rape. I’d never thought that was my problem. That nail file had done the job.

It was even harder to veer away from my old edgy emotions and fears now, after feeling that bolt of earthy energy from the ground under my feet, from the man behind me, whose hands in front of mine had tapped into all that subterranean sexuality.

Maybe my prince had come.

Literally.

So the good news at this point was that my sudden sogginess wasn’t my usually predictable period after all. The bad news was that I’d never had much luck playing well with men and I might be heading for another major disappointment. At least my über-headache was gone and I didn’t remember dreams of any kind from last night whatsoever. Round one to Ric Montoya. Too bad I didn’t have time to moon over him a little.

I had a lot of other things to do, Hector Nightwine still looming number one on my A-list. I’d come back from the breakfast buffet at the Lotsa-Slotsa-Fun on this gentrification-doomed low-end part of the Strip when my phone rang at 11:00 A.M. on the dot.

My first phone call in Vegas! I let it ring two more times for sheer pleasure before I panicked and flipped it open. In the meantime I fantasized that Hector Nightwine’s secretary . . . a male secretary named Niven . . . was on the line begging me to see his boss.
Hmmm
, my fantasies were definitely perking up.

“Hello.”

“Good morning. It’s Ric.”

Number two. Not bad.

“Ye-es?” I’d never turned one word into two with that little purring note in my voice.
Get it together, girl!
Irma nagged me.

“I’m back in the park.”
And
he gave great phone voice.

“Oh.” Was it going to be
their
place?

“I wondered if you could come over before noon.”

Hmm.
Charming hot-dog-stand lunch in the park. Feeding bun breadcrumbs to the ducks. Settling down at “their” picnic table. Arranging something more formal. Dinner perhaps. Plus I could keep an eye on Hector’s place and maybe figure out how to storm the palace somehow.

“Sure.”

No, girlfriend! Hard to get.

Too late.

That is no way you play a hot guy, a fashion stud right out of GQ, honey.

I gagged my inner girlfriend. Sometimes she is way too shallow.

Ric seemed a serious guy underneath the high-end accessories. He obviously believed he could dowse for water, and . . . maybe he could. I have an open mind. But maybe I’d better consider wearing a Lite Days pad if we’re rendezvousing in the park again. Those dowsing rod visions seemed to have touched something in me nothing, or no one, ever had before.

Still, visions of sedate sugarplums danced in my convent-bred head. A stroll, maybe an ice cream cone for dessert in the desert. Something sweet, mundane, and old-fashioned. Pure Kansas corn.

                                                                                          * * * *

I parked Dolly in a lot off Sunset Road and walked back to the area where I’d met Ric. It’s a huge park, with tennis and golfing areas, but I kept bearing west until I spied Kon Tiki (my nickname for Mr. Easter Island head). He got me near where I needed to be.

I stop, bemused. There is a dreamlike quality to the scene I walk into slowly. Time slows down like lazy molasses.

The park right here is teeming with busy men in suits and buff uniformed cops in buff-colored uniforms: Bermuda shorts and short-sleeved shirts that showcase tanned biceps and quads. The air buzzes with walkie-talkie communications. Chrome yellow
Crime Scene: Do Not Cross
tape wraps several of the dead-dedicated trees, cordoning off a pizza-pie-shaped slice of the open ground.

A chill runs up my spine when I triangulate between the reeds on the west, Kon Tiki’s dour face on the lake’s central island, and Sunset Road. This is “our” place and suddenly, this summer, it is verboten to anyone not among the city’s law enforcement crowd.

“’Scuse me, miss.” Officer Buff is looming beside me. “This area is off-limits to the public.”

Luckily I’m stunned into silence long enough for an equally authoritative voice behind me to announce, “Miss Street is with me.”

Ric Montoya is standing behind me. As has become usual for us. His designer sunglasses with their titanium frames only enhance his strong cheekbones, aristocratic nose, knife-edge jaw. He is still just as good-looking, just as professional, and he is eyeing me like I am a ten of clubs in a game of Twenty-One. Keep or fold?

“What’s going on here?” I ask when Officer Buff has withdrawn in a state of high grouch. I know his type. Works out, hits the tanning beds, and thinks he’s the cat’s pajamas. Likes to pull over helpless women on a pretext, and if they’re young and alone, screw them.

“Something I thought you should see,” Ric says.

I eye the Crime Scene tape. I’ve been here before, at crime scenes in Kansas, with a camera crew. But not after melting down the previous evening on this very spot.

“I know it’ll be hard.” Ric is standing very close to me, face-to-face this time, his fingertips on my elbows. He has excellent fingertip technique no matter the occasion. “I know you saw something . . . awful. I felt that too. You need to see what’s really there.”

“I do?”

He leans away, stung. “No, you’re right.
I
do. Maybe
we
do. I won’t let go of you.”

How many women have dreamed of hearing that from the right guy? But I know how he means it. Literally. He won’t let go of me. We’ll be linked. In touch. And he knows what this is about.

I nod. I’m a tough girl. I’ve seen dead people before.

Ric leads us to the tape, where we’re questioned again. Ric flashes an ID. “The captain okayed it.”

“You maybe. Her too?”

“A new associate, Miss Street.”

The middle-aged officer is all on-duty starch. I could be a naked Madonna impersonator and he wouldn’t blink an eye. “Go ahead.”

We duck under the familiar yellow plastic ribbon, not attached to an old oak tree but to small pine and ash trees. Out-of-the-blue songs are running through my mind, the windmills in my mind. Interior distraction for what I might be seeing all too soon.

Ric leads me to where we stood together only last twilight. There is now an actual pit, larger than a bread box; say the size of a grave site, all the better to accommodate the CSI crew kneeling around the revealed centerpiece. This is a pair of interlocked skeletons lying in a tomb of desiccated limestone. A hard night’s digging work. Someone really wanted them six feet under.

The skeletons seem blissful, even rapturous, unaware of their gruesome state, or even of when death came. Grinning skulls face each other in profile, all the teeth in place, as clean and even as pearl bangles. The spines and ribs are collapsed, but the arm bones intertwine, and the large leg bones tangle with each other forming a horizontal ladder. It’s hard for a civilian like me to discern the finger and foot bones, but something about the pair’s cuddling position, now eternal, screams young lovers.

When you’re about to faint it’s just like in those movie special-effects sequences. You stay fixed in place and the foreground is rushing away from your senses as if you were on a departing French super-train.
Zoom
.

Because I now find myself hit with a rerun of the exact visceral blend of high-impact sex and death I’d felt yesterday afternoon. These dry bones, so sedate now, are the writhing, naked, ultimately blood-soaked limbs of the coupling couple of my vision.

“Male and female,” I mutter at Ric.

“Good. What else?”

“Passion and death.”

“Is it ever different?”

I ignore his cynicism, too busy tapping my own.

“Murder.”

His hands tighten on my upper arms.

I frown. “Old.”

“Old? Who?”

“Old. Just old. Believe me, I know old!”

He stands behind me like a wall, his fingertips reading the tremors of my nerves and skin.

“Thanks,” Ric says. “Don’t say anything. The lead detective is coming. He’ll be a pain. Let me answer.”

“I speak for myself.”

“When you know the ground.”

“These are my . . . corpses.”

“Mine too.
Shhh
. Delilah.” He whispers in my ear. Touches it with the tip of his tongue.

Well, that worked. I am pretty much speechless. How did he know my first name? How did he know how to shut me up?

The plainclothes man swaggers over, dripping dislike. I can see why. He is short, squat, vampire-pale without any of the mystique that goes with a professional bloodsucker.

“If it ain’t the Cadaver Kid again,” he says to Ric. “I heard you were nosing around, Montoya.” The voice is grating, egotistical, and, my very favorite thing to go after with a nail file, bullying.

“Detective Haskell.” Ric’s voice sounds icy but I can sense he is super hot under that cool white collar. I’m suddenly very attuned to what’s under that cool white collar. “The captain likes me to eyeball these crime scenes. And I did call it in.”

“You. Not your little casino luck-piece tootsie.”

I stiffen as much as Ric had done on me yesterday. His hands clamp like handcuffs on my arms, a dislocated gag, but I get the message.

“Miss Street is a fellow professional,” he says, smooth as variated tinted glass in a 24-carat gold-accented frame. “An associate.”

“And what’s your specialty, sister? Knee-work?”

I tear loose of Ric and round on the Lieutenant. He’s middle-aged, middle-gutted, middling-haired; every position-loving, not-very-sharp man who likes to throw his considerable weight around instead of doing his job.

I draw on all the interviews I’ve done with women in law enforcement.

“Quantico didn’t think so, Lieutenant, when I took their serial killer workshop with John Douglas. Granted this is all theoretical and speculative compared to what you might dig up from beat work, but you have male/female vics here, you have major trauma to the remaining bones, which indicates an ultra-violent—and bizarrely controlled—end. You have
coitus interruptus,
which guarantees a textbook-sick perp, and you have very old bones, which means a very . . . cold . . . case.”

The guy stands paralyzed.

“Remind me,” Ric murmurs in my same damn oversensitive ear, “to forget about getting a pit bull.”

“So you’re FBI too,” Detective Haskell says. “
Ex
-FBI like our Meskin friend here?”

At first I don’t get the word, “Meskin,” but Ric’s fingers digging into my upper arms allow me to translate it, pronto.

“Right,” I say. Claiming to be ex-FBI gives me much more status than admitting to being a reporter. An ex-reporter. “And I didn’t quite get what you just said.”