SUSPENSE THRILLERS-A Boxed Set (38 page)

Kay turned her back, whipping around so fast her black taffeta skirt swished against her thighs. She ran to the hall closet and grabbed her purse, snatched the maid's silly white hat from her hair, and was out the door on her way home without saying goodbye.

She worked harder and harder at the health club. They told her she was going to pay, she was pushing too hard, too fast, but she didn't care. It felt good to have pain, to lose herself in it. At night she lay on top of the sheets and stared at the cracked ceiling overhead stippled with shadows from the streetlights. Her back and stomach hurt, her legs, and shoulders, her neck and arms. But she was looking good. Better than she had in ten years. No one would ever know she had been the mother of two children.

No one would ever have guessed.

~*~

Mitchell Samson walked into the Hot Spot at a quarter after ten on a Saturday night when the place was packed and jumping. He found an empty table close to the men's room. He ordered the Irish coffee and turned his attention to the stage. He'd never seen the place this lively. What the hell could be the new attraction? She must be a knockout.

Not the girl on stage. That was Babycakes and the regulars knew her. Great and sexy, but no Jezebel.

He scanned the room and gauged the temperature. It was pretty steamy, and rising. Guys were after the girls who served the tables. “Wanna go out with me after this joint closes? Want to make some money, honey? Want to make it with a real man?” All the old lines, all the old brush-offs. The dancers had to wait on the customers between gigs and they had their hands full tonight.

He turned his gaze back to Babycakes who was winding up her dance. He hadn't noticed a new girl advertised on the posters in the glass cases outside the club. It had to be that, though. This place never pulled such a crowd, even on a Saturday night. Maybe she was so new they hadn't done any publicity photos yet. Could be.

Interesting. Word had spread along the street fast. He was in here just the week before and it was deader than roadkill.

Babycakes walked off stage with her tits swinging, her shoulders squared, and her G-string riding high. Mitchell admired her bravado in the face of whatever young woman had come along to draw the crowd. He put his hands together to clap for her loud and hard. The crowd joined in. Good. The girl deserved some appreciation, that was obvious.

Could his favorite, Jezebel, have made it word-of-mouth and drawn this mob? Is that who was about to part the curtains and mesmerize them the way she had him? That rankled. She was his devotion. He didn't much want to share her.

A new song by Prince came over the music system and the men took a collective breath and held it. Mitchell had his cup of Irish halfway to his lips when she walked down the runway like Queen Cleopatra taking her place before her subjects. Walked. She didn't dance out. She didn't slink. She didn't vamp. The platter-player said, “Gentlemen, we are proud to give you SHADOW, the sensation of the nation, the dark side of the wild side. Only the Shadow knows which way the wayward wind blows . . .”

Mitchell lowered the cup to the table with a shaky hand. He checked to see if his mouth was hanging open and it was. He shut it with a snap, his eyes glued to the stage.

Shadow did it all wrong and it worked anyway. It worked like gangbusters. The men who had come to see her, even those who were now drunk, didn't pull any stunts. They might have been statues, all turned to stone and gone to heaven. Faces softened, eyes glistened, jaws went slack, and eighty male heartbeats drummed as one, in love. Or lust. Or both.

She was a dark doll. She moved just slightly to the music, and she never looked at the audience. She kept her long lashes down cast. Her hands roved over breasts and waist, slid down hips and thighs. She took the center pole as if it were a lover, while men ground their teeth and drew their muscles tight to keep from leaping onto the stage to carry her away. Shadow might have been alone in her own bedroom thinking the most exquisitely private, sensuous thoughts for all the attention she gave the room full of men.

Mitchell couldn't believe his eyes. Her loveliness was something absolute and indisputable. She was a goddess, something come to life from myth. She was a queen, not flesh and blood. She had the movements, smooth but careful, that made the men lean forward toward her. She was of medium height, but not small, perfectly proportioned, the breasts behind the veil of pink nylon round and tilted, the nipples shockingly large. Skin the color of lightly stained birch, flawless, smooth, reflecting a soft sheen like the finest polished wood.

He watched her long hair sway, the black color so deep it could mirror a face from its surface. He watched her while she ignored the room, and when the song, a long one, drowned in its last note with a wail from Prince, she vanished, the curtains trembling from her passage through them.

Mitchell blinked. He looked around at the other entranced men. They came to their feet and a thunder rose from their stomping and clapping. He sat perfectly still wondering if he had seen what he thought he had seen. Of all the exotic dancers in this city he had watched over the years, he had never experienced such a loss when she left his sight to disappear behind the curtains.

“My God,” he breathed. “Jesus Jumping Christ.” Who and what was Shadow? A miracle of some sort, that's all she could be. An Eve walking the depths of the underbelly of the entertainment world. Was she real?

He gulped down the Irish coffee and ordered another. He sat at the table, as did the rest of the audience, for the next four hours hoping to see Shadow again. He had to see her to be sure he had not been dreaming. But she did not dance another set and she did not wait the tables. They closed the place at two. Mitchell came out into the night with a stumble.

The dancers after Shadow were a blur, a distraction to him. He had drunk way too many whiskeys and coffee. He was, by Jiminy and glory be, drunk as a goddamned skunk, hey, hey, whatta you say?

He called for a cab from the corner phone booth, knowing it was going to be a bitch to come down here on a Sunday morning to pick up his car.

At home, he had to fiddle with the door and the key for ten minutes to make anything work. Pavlov almost knocked him down, butted his legs, whacked him with his back end, and Mitchell didn't even scold him. The dog, a well-trained boxer who could hold his water longer than a camel, barked to go out. Mitchell said, “Shut up, you crazy mutt, I gotta get some sleep,” then promptly fell fully clothed onto the sofa.

After whining for a full five minutes to no avail, then sniffing at Mitchell's face before backing off at the scent of alcohol, Pavlov climbed onto the sofa and curled over his master's legs like a rumpled blanket.

He'd just have to hold on till morning.

Seven

She thought of herself as Shadow now. Kay? Katherine? That was another person in another life. Light years in the past. Buried in the graves of her children.

So when the manager, Bertram, called her back from the private exit door leading to the alley where her parked Toyota waited, she corrected him. “Call me Shadow,” she said. “That's my name.” She liked and adopted the name because Charlene had given it to her. It fit her like no other could.

“Yeah, that's what I meant to say, sure you're Shadow, sure, baby. That was some performance tonight! Had them with their tongues hanging out. Now you could do a little more shaking and stroking, you know what I mean, but essentially, you got what it takes. I knew that the first time I saw you. I can spot ‘em, don't think I can't. I ain't seen a crowd like this in years.”

“Let me do it my way or I don't do it,” she said, pushing open the door. “And since the boys liked me so well, I expect another fifty dollars a week.”

“Now hold on one goddamn minute, I never said . . .”

“Fifty. Or I walk.” She sucked in the night air, smiling to herself, glad to be out of the smoke-filled atmosphere of the club. Cheap perfume. Sweat. Stink.

Bottom of the barrel stink. Some people said they loved humanity. What was there to love, but the stink of them? Pawing, fawning sons of bitches, the whole lot. Men. They brought misery and pain and left behind bad tastes in the mouth and memories that broke your heart.

She was glad they hadn't known, though, how scared she was out on the stage. It was her second performance and she'd had to psyche herself but good to go out on that garishly lighted stage wearing what she wouldn't be caught dead wearing at home. In her real life. It was nothing like the dancing she had done before in the elegant atmosphere at Babe's. That was a class place that attracted the class clientele. The Hot Spot was about a hundred levels below Babe's, down there in the stink, floating like scum in the swill. She had tried the better places, but despite her workouts and muscle tone, despite her new stylish cut that let her black glistening hair swing free around her face and shoulders, they thought they just couldn't use her, sorry. She was one helluva nice looking woman, though, they'd say that for her.

Well fuck them and their backhanded compliments. She never really believed she could dance the better clubs anyway. She might not look thirty, but she didn't look eighteen either. She'd had a choice to make—continue working for Severenson Maid Service and running into families with children where she had to control her wild urges to attack the fathers, or take a job dancing. Wherever they would let her. There was no choice. Not unless she wanted to go to prison for murdering an absolute stranger just because he might accidentally drop his son or knock him aside when rushing out the door for work.

Charlene told her she could do it. Charlene believed in her when no one else did. “You've gotten yourself all dolled up,” she said. “I don't think I've ever seen anyone so pretty.”

Before Charlene came from Marion, Kay was able to buy the Toyota, and move from the boarding house. A girl she met at the exercise gym told her about a place that needed a house-sitter. The girl worked as an apartment-locating representative, and this place had come up, but no one wanted to take it because of the house's reputation. Kay asked what reputation was that, maybe she'd be interested. She needed something cheap.

“How's free sound? That cheap enough?” The girl brushed streaked-blonde hair from her eyes, reached over and gripped a couple of weights, her biceps popping and straining.

“Free? Like no rent?”

“It's free because the owner can't get anyone to stay in it. He just wants someone to be there while he's out of the country—off in Spain somewhere . . . Lisbon? . . . anyway, he's afraid the place is going to get trashed. Vandals, drug dealers, squatters, all that. It's already happened twice and cost him an arm and a leg to redo the place. He doesn't want any money out of it, the guy's rolling in dough, he just wants house-sitters. Think you might do it? I get a commission anyway, the guy's paying us to find someone.”

“Depends. What kind of reputation are you talking about? What kind of house and where is it?”

“Well, the reputation, see, is that the former owner was killed in it.”

A flash of gunshot and blood crossed Shadow's vision momentarily. She swallowed, tried to concentrate.

“He was a queer, some kid killed him. But there aren't ghosts or anything, right? It's a mansion, a real mansion, honest. Big as a hotel. You could throw parties in there like you wouldn't believe.”

Shadow wasn't interested in parties. She was interested in free rent, though. “So where is it?”

“Out in Seabrook. Near the water.”

“God. That's way out. I'd have to drive forever.”

The girl shrugged and put down the weights. When she bent over, cleavage showed from the rim of her silver Spandex top. The blond surfer walked by, head cranked in her direction until Shadow gave him a look.

“Yeah, that's out of town, but it's a neat place. You ought to go check it out. I can't take it, I have a lease, but it's a real deal. All you have to do is keep it clean, don't break anything, and pay the electric bill.”

“I can go look, I guess. When's the owner coming back?”

“Not for a year at least, maybe longer.”

Shadow toured the house, loved it, and moved in the next weekend. She had a place for Charlene, and she didn't have to spend a bundle of money getting it. She didn't even have to lay out money for furniture.

There was just one problem. The mansion spooked Charlene. She thought it was cold and gloomy. It had too many rooms and echoed every time she walked through it. She mentioned voices, but Shadow tried to turn the conversation away from that.

She told her to look at the funny side of it. “What's funny about this mausoleum?” Charlene wanted to know.

“Well, we don't have much money, we're driving a ten-year-old Toyota with rusty rocker panels, but we get to live in a mansion big enough for ten families, and rich enough to please a millionaire.”

Charlene made a humphing sound, but she soon settled in and stopped complaining. It was better than nothing, she admitted. It was lots better than being locked up in Marion.

Living fifty miles out from the center of Houston, Shadow had to give up the exercise club. Instead she ran every day (around and around the mansion), and did sit-ups until she was soaked with sweat and blistering the walls with profanity at how much it hurt. She bought weights, an exercise table, and a stationary bicycle.

She hated driving the long distance in to the club, and the job was, to say the least, not one hell of a lot better than cleaning people's toilets for a living.

“Exotic dancing,” Charlene said one day. “It pays great and you don't have to diddle with the guys if you don't want to.”

“It’s not as much fun as you think.”

Charlene's eyes grew misty and she took on a faraway look. “Just about any kind of job has some fun in it. I wish I knew how to dance. I can't even follow the rhythm for a two-step. I always stepped on Louise's toes in the rec room. She hated being my partner.”

“Dancing's dancing. It's no big deal. I'll teach you how to do the two-step one day.”

Charlene brought her gaze back to Shadow's face. “You will?”