Ladies' Night (10 page)

. . .
catsup
.

Unh-unh. That shit was
blood!

The girl's arms were long, a warm, light-colored brown. They reached out to him. The palms of her hands were dripping. Blood spotted the counter.

He felt something knot up big as a man's fist inside his gut. Not fear — he had a gun on the girl for fuck's sake — but a shock of recognition, that old
Jumma
had maybe got outclassed by this one, that this bitch was bold as he was and a whole lot crazier, and all of a sudden he was wondering where the other bitches were and where the cook was and what the fuck was happening here.

He was wondering that when the bag lady wrapped her arms around him and hugged him to her reeking body from behind and the gun went off in the counter-bitch's face so that she went down like a tree. He struggled, but the bag lady bitch only woofed in his ear and hugged him tighter.

Damn! she was strong
. He couldn't break her.

He couldn't turn around!

He saw two more girls coming out from in back, drifting toward him like a pair of goddamn crazy ghosts and he fired at them but with only his forearm free of the bag-bitch the shots went wild. He didn't know how many times he fired but all of a sudden the gun was empty.

He squirmed and began to whimper, feeling righteous terror as the girls climbed up over the counter.

Behind him the front door slammed. Somebody on the run.

The girls reached out to him, their little brown uniforms and little brown caps splotched with blood — hands and faces too — and one of them had been
reaching into something
because her arms were wet and red to the elbow and
that was not no fucking hamburger
.

He smelled fat burning and the urinal stink of the woman behind him.

He began screaming when they opened the counter and hauled him back where the grill was, and then he was screaming so fucking loud one of them held his jaw open while the other reached inside.
 
Her polished red fingernails dug down and tore forward and he was looking at his tongue in her hand. He had stopped screaming and was spitting blood.

The pistol dropped from his hand.

When the faintness passed he looked up from the floor and saw the mess on the grill and knew what had happened to the cook. He felt the heat of the grill as they lifted him up and pressed his face slowly down.

Bitches, I was only gonna rob you!
he thought.
For that you gonna
fry
me?

The grill and
Jumma
sizzled.

Bailey was sure now. He'd never seen a bar like this. Not New Year's, not Christmas.
Never
. He felt a black flash of vertigo.

The bar spoke only in murmurs, in subtle waves of heat. Even the juke was silent. In some ways that was worst of all. It occurred to him that he'd been waiting for somebody to get up and feed it a quarter for fifteen minutes now.

Whatever was happening here he was part of it —
the nervous part
.

MacInery's
had gone from crowded to damn near deserted in record time — and it was early yet, but nobody was coming in. He'd watched single guys and couples walk out the door, glancing around in what looked to Bailey like some weird sort of superstitious dread. And when his regulars left him — Sam and Bob and Tony — without so much as a word to him, all doubts disappeared. Something was seriously wrong here, something fundamental.

Because other couples had left in a different way altogether.

Women leading their men like dogs on a leash — boyfriends, husbands, pickups — leading them as though into some impossible ravenous night, to something infinitely more private than anything they were expecting.

How did he know this?

He just did. They wore it on their faces.

He wiped the bar, served the drinks.

The place was charged with gunpowder. He was not about to go lighting any matches.

He poured a cup of coffee from the pot on the burner. There was not a soul in the bar whose exact location he wasn't aware of. He'd never watched so hard in his goddamn life.

That writer — Patty something — kept looking at him. He'd always liked Patty but not now. He dropped his eyes away from her and went back to work. A Ross Macdonald line scuttled through his mind unbidden, he remembered it because it had always reminded him of his former girlfriend.
The small chill presence that lived like a stunted child in her fine body
.

That was Patty now. Again he marked her position.
Seated, number two table, nursing a tequila sunrise.

There were half a dozen women left at the tables, three at the bar. Five men at the tables.

And only Tom, with Cindy, at the bar.

You had the two cooks, Dom and Franco, in the kitchen, and the three waitresses.

That was another thing. The waitresses never hung out in the kitchen. Too hot back there. Usually they liked to drink Cokes out here with him and joke with the regulars. But not tonight. For the past half hour he'd hardly seen them.

He'd never felt so alone in a bar in his life.

The only regular that was left was Tom and he was, shall we say, busy. Cindy was keeping him
busy
. Like some of the others he seemed practically transfixed. Spellbound. The same glassy look half the other guys had tonight.

Nobody else seemed to worry about it. Just Bailey.

But the place was raw with sex.

Every guy in the place must have thought he was scoring.

In the farthest table to the right a couple was openly necking. It didn't seem to bother the guy at all that half an hour ago his date had dumped her drink all over his shirt. A little more and he'd have good cause to eighty-six the both of them. If he dared.

Which he didn't.

And right here at table four next to Patty, a woman in jeans and halter top had her arm around the guy beside her and was fondling his nipple inside his Hawaiian shirt.

Jesus! Didn't they know this shit was
impossible?
Didn't these guys
feel
it?

Something was going down and sex was just part of it — and maybe only a small part of it. There was something else happening that was cold, androgynous, sexless. End-stop. Like death.

What he really wanted to do was to clear the goddamn bar.

He'd considered it a dozen times but it was nowhere near closing time and there was nothing to pin it to, no incident, and he was seriously afraid of starting one. But if nobody else sensed violence in the air, he did.

Take it easy
, he thought,
and let things take their course. With a little luck and some patience you'll get out of here fine
.

The woman in the halter top got up and reached for her date's hand. The guy in the Hawaiian shirt stood up beside her
stuporous
and smiling. She put her arm around him and they drifted out the door.

That left eleven
.

And eight men.

He couldn't stop tallying, figuring the odds.

He glanced at the two women at the bar two seats down from Tom and Cindy. He got the same feeling from these two that you got from a bad drunk — only they weren't drunk. They weren't doing much of anything, not even talking. Just sitting there. But he could hardly look at them.

And one was downright beautiful. A tall, willowy brunette.

The other was shorter, blonde, kind of dumpy. But what they had in common was the eyes. He'd put their drinks down in front of them but he couldn't meet their eyes. Same with Patty.

Same with all of them.

These two were watching him, though. He knew it the way you knew somebody was staring at the back of your neck — you knew without knowing. Sending out strange little waves of allure.
Come talk to us. Come on
.

He wasn't having any.

His coffee tasted dark and sour. He dumped it in the sink. To hell with it. He'd made up his mind.

He was going to close the place.

Family emergency
, he thought. It was stupid to wait. He was not going to be happy until he was back in his apartment with the door shut.

He was definitely closing.

~ * ~

He'd been trying to think what she reminded him of and Tom had it now. And he'd have left her right then and there had he not turned a corner with her long ago, had he not felt suddenly and without warning that blast of sensuousness that swirled out of her deep and greedy, a pure bold vice that made the sensuality of his wife and Elizabeth and every other woman he'd ever known seem childish by comparison.

She took his hand, pressed it between her own hands so he could feel the heat of her, brought it close to her face so he could feel her breath on his fingertips — and that was when he saw it, in the position of head and hands and knew what she reminded him of.

A mantis.

He'd watched them often as a child. Slow and deliberate until the final blinding moment of predation, alert and thoroughly voracious. A cannibal who would eat her mate and preferred to devour him alive. A death machine, quick and deadly, its huge mandibles unstoppable, forelegs gripping, the relationship of legs to head a sudden nexus of horror.

He had watched them eat.

This was what he recognized.

And didn't care.

Not while the urgent scent and electric closeness of her body continued to press him deeper into the wind and promise a burst of dreams.

~ * ~

Outside the bar, sirens and a sudden scream.

A man's howl of agony
.

Bailey looked up from the register, wiped the sweat off his nose and stared hard through the windows.

The bar fell silent.

A man in a rumpled business suit ran by. The man looked over his shoulder and stumbled and then got to his hands and knees. Bailey heard the sound of a garbage can being knocked over as he disappeared from view.

It 's starting
, thought Bailey.
It's right outside the window
.

The silence in the bar seemed to hang from a single thread. A gust of summer wind whistled past the door.

And snapped it.

~ * ~

Tom thought,
what's funny? What is that?

The laughter was Erica's, high and hysterical. She was moving through the kitchen doorway, a covered silver platter on a silver serving tray balanced precariously on her hand and shoulder and shaking with laughter so that he thought,
she's going to drop that thing
, Chris and Rita appearing behind her, laughing too as Erica's knees began to buckle.

He got up to help her and glanced at Bailey. The look on Bailey's face stopped him cold, made him hesitate.

The small, balding man in the party of four wasn't as lucky. Tom could see the brown liquor stain on his shirt as he reached out to take the tray and steady her. A good-looking young woman with long blonde hair stood up beside him. He had time to wonder, his
date?

Then everything happened fast.

Erica stopped laughing — and the man no sooner had his hand on her shoulder than her own went to the cover of the serving tray and threw it off.

The man recoiled as though bitten by a snake.

From where Tom stood he had a clear view of them, his senses recording the scene in minute detail while his brain tried to do the impossible and process it
Dom, the cook, Mexican, illegally employed, thirty-six or so, flirts with the waitresses, awkward, miserable grasp of the language
and . . .

They'd hit him with something first, blood was dark and matted over his face and hair and lay in a ripe, blackening pool at the bottom of the tray. His mouth and eyes were open. Protruding from the mouth was what at first looked like a tongue engorged in size and split into long attenuated segments that curled down at the ends into the bright gore pooling from the stump of neck — but it wasn't a tongue, it was a hand severed at the wrist and shoved deep down his throat, just the fingers and knuckles visible crawling from the mouth like a great pale spider flecked with blood.

He remembered how Dom had patted her earlier.

The kitchen door flew open and Chris and Rita moved to her side, the bald man stepping back and stumbling, terrified of the three of them and the thing on the plate, into the arms of the blonde at his table, her hand going to his chin and pulling his head back while the other hand went to his neck with the butter knife, and there were shouts and — horribly —
laughter
as the entire bar was suddenly on its feet, moving in a strange distorted adrenal rhythm and he felt a silent warning behind him.

Cindy
.

He whirled and saw the two women at the bar reach for Bailey — but Bailey was ahead of them. His hand was already on the coffeepot. The coffee splashed scalding hot across the pretty woman's face and the pot continued on its arc across the face and head of the woman beside her, shattering.