SUSPENSE THRILLERS-A Boxed Set (71 page)

While she danced or talked to men at tables, she'd also work on the problem of dealing with the copycat. Only now she thought of him as the Copycat, with a capital C. Maybe he would call her at the club. She must talk him into meeting her face to face.

She felt in the bottom of the gym bag for the stainless steel stubby Smith and Wesson .38 revolver, a gun she had bought off one of the girls at work. Shadow knew little about guns other than what Scott had taught her when deer season hit East Texas, but she listened carefully when the dancer who sold her the gun said, “This is a Chiefs Special, two-inch barrel, with a shrouded hammer so it won't snag on your clothes. It's an "Airweight," weighing just fourteen ounces. That's a few ounces heavier than what cops carry, but not by much. I've found it to be a perfect weapon for protection.”

“But will it stop a man?” Shadow wanted to know. “Stop ‘em? Honey, it'll kill the sons of bitches dead! But one thing you gotta watch . . .”

“What's that?”

“Gun like this has no safety. Anytime that trigger gets pulled, there's going to be a helluva blast. So handle it careful.”

It was unregistered and, although it might take more than one shot to bring down a determined man, if she aimed at the head, there wouldn't be any problem in dropping him where he stood. Son needed a bullet to the brain.

With her new resolve and the fourteen ounces of metal in her gym bag she felt as though she was made of reinforced concrete. She was invincible. She was smart. She wasn't crazy like him.

Now to find the freak and end all this before he brought down not only her, but Charlene, too.

Bruce had called complaining that the men wanted to see her. She was one of his headliners, she couldn't just take off for days this way, damnit. And the cop had called, he added. “You ought to get your head examined, hanging around with that guy,” he warned. “You can't trust the heat.”

She bit her tongue to keep from telling him what an asshole he was and that she'd prefer he stay out of her personal business, thank you very much. But it was no time to argue with the boss. She needed the job to pay the bills and buy food and gas. She needed the job as camouflage while she hunted down Son.

At the Blue Boa, after she was dressed for a set on stage, she peeked between the curtains and saw Bruce had put in strobe lights. It made the dancers look like puppets on strings, flickering in and out of light and dark. God. It would give her a migraine.

The strobe lights also completely ruined a dancer's chances of seeing who was in the club at the bar and tables. Shadow suspected Bruce wanted it that way. Some of the girls had been giving blow and hand jobs in the back booths. Vice caught them doing it, they'd close down the club.

Was Mitch out there? She had to deal with him sooner or later, but she did not yet know what she would say.

“Phone call!” Bruce yelled from the payphone.

Shadow flinched and looked to see if he meant it was for her. He gestured, his mouth set in hard lines. It was either Son or Mitchell. She hurried to take the call.

“Will you please tell your fucking boyfriends not to fucking call you here?” Bruce dropped the receiver so that it banged against the wall. He stomped off, cursing women who got involved with his customers.

“Yes,” she said into the phone.

“Will you take the next one?”

It was Son. That hushed, muffled, slightly British voice that sent chills scuttling like long-legged spiders up her spine.

“I gotta use the phone.” Another dancer tapped Shadow on the shoulder. “Okay? I really gotta have it.”

“Wait . . .”

Son said, “I don't think we should wait. Don't you enjoy running the cops in circles? We should keep them guessing.”

“Not you,” she said into the phone. “I wasn't saying wait to you, I was talking to someone here.”

“Oh, you're busy, aren't you?”

“Lookit, I gotta important call to make. You mind?” The woman moved over so she was in Shadow's line of sight. She didn't look as if she was going to leave until she got what she wanted.

“Meet me,” Shadow said quickly.

“I don't think so.” He sounded amused.

‘Please. We have to talk.”

“No, that's quite impossible.”

“But. . .”

“This is important, I said!” The dancer's voice bordered on a screech. Her face was fox-like, feral and pointed, eyes squinted. Shadow wanted to slap her.

“It's your turn,” Son said. “If you don't do it, I will.” Then he hung up and Shadow took the receiver and knocked it once, hard, against the wall.

The woman standing behind her said, “Well, shit, don't get pissed, I have to call my babysitter. She called while I was on stage and told Bruce my baby's running a fever.”

Shadow glared at her before stalking away. This fucking place, she thought. These fucking people.

That fucking lunatic calling her, ordering her around . . .

~*~

After her set, with the drowning tune of an AC/DC song echoing in her ears, and the strobe lights blinding her, Shadow received word in the dressing room that Mitch wanted to see her out front at his table. So he was here, all right.

The lingering flicking of the strobe lights, the thundering music, the roomful of smoke, the tension that came into her belly when Son called, it had not gone away, and now all of it conspired to bring on the headache. She swallowed three aspirin, chased by Coke, before dressing and going to him. She had to say something, but she wasn't yet sure what.

It felt as if she were on a merry-go-round and it was spinning out of control, faster and faster. The world blurred by, unreal, intangible. She couldn't get a firm grip on anything, especially her thoughts. They twirled and eddied so that she was talking to herself in her head, talking in snatches about first Son and then Charlene and, next, she was preparing a speech for Mitchell, something to make him give up on her, but then she'd argue with herself, not wanting him to give up at all. It was like having multiple personalities, she guessed, where a dozen conversations at once went on in her head. It was all mind-numbing static in the end, none of the internal dialogue helpful to her.

She stepped from the wings of the stage and took the two steps down to the club floor. She couldn't see a damn thing. The new lighting lit up the club, then plunged it into darkness, over and over again. She stood frozen, realizing she couldn't even move through the tables because she couldn't see them long enough to navigate her way. She had no idea where Mitch was sitting. She'd trip and break her neck trying to find him. She briefly considered turning around and leaving the club by the alley door. Couldn't she just skip some of the problems that plagued her?

A male hand came around the tender flesh of her forearm and she suddenly jerked away, afraid it was one of the drunken customers manhandling her. “Shadow, it's me.”

It was him. She let him lead her through the tables to his own. She felt for a chair with both her hands outstretched in front of her, blinded each time the strobe flashed. He helped her be seated. She thought, I can't work here if Bruce keeps those lights. I'll have to go somewhere else.

“I tried calling you,” Mitch said. “You were never here and the manager wouldn't give out your number. It's unlisted, isn't it?”

“Yeah, it is.”

“What's wrong?”

His hands came around hers where she had them over her face. “I can't see you anymore, go out with you, become involved with you,” she said.

He laughed and she wanted to jump up and move around the table into his arms, tell him, yes, it's just a joke, I'm testing you. But she said, “I mean it.”

His hands fell away from hers. “I don't see how you can really want that.”

“But, I do. It's just not . . . it won't work out.”

“Why the hell not? What's changed your mind?”

“I can't talk now. I have to leave. My head's killing me.” She came to her feet, avoiding looking at him, and was not more than two feet away from the table when she ran into an occupied chair. Someone said, “Hey, baby, how you doin'?” and she moved on, bumping into tables, chairs, people, until she stumbled her way into the dressing room.

“That funny light's making everybody blind,” Mom said, coming to guide her. “How you been, girl? Haven't seen you in the place for days on end.”

Shadow sat down and closed her eyes. “I have a headache.”

“Want some aspirin? I think I have a bottle of Bayer around here somewhere. I might even have some extra-strength Excedrin.”

“No, I already took something. Just let me . . . I have to be quiet.”

Mom made reassuring sounds and went back to arranging the cosmetics in their Tupperware bowls while Shadow dealt with a headache that was nothing compared to the throbbing that rampaged through her heart.

~*~

Son had called her from the St John, a club that was new, up and coming, featuring some of the most talented girls in the business. It was going to give the Blue Boa a run for its money.

He sat at a booth in disguise, almost hoping the cop would come in. The cop wouldn't recognize him at all with the mustache and extra weight padded around his midsection. He might not have remembered him even without the disguise, after all it had been years since he interviewed him at the station.

Son didn't mean to be on the hunt or pick up a victim tonight. He just didn't want to spend time at home. With Mother. It broke his heart every time he moved past her closed door. He couldn't stand it.

Could. Not. Stand it.

He should call a funeral home, he knew that. He would do it presently, really, just as soon as this other was out of his way. He was too busy right now to handle all the tedious details of burying his mother. He'd have to pick out a coffin, find a dress for her to be buried in, select a monument. Wood coffin or steel? Her pale pink dress with the rounded collar at the neck or the robin's-egg blue she favored for sunny spring days? An angel atop a square granite stone or a nice, restrained plaque with just her name, and the dates of birth and death? He didn't know, he couldn't decide, he wondered, when he could ever decide all those details . . .

Oh, he couldn't handle these thoughts. If he did. If he took care of those things, she would . . .

haunt him

. . . be gone forever.

He expected she would be angry if she knew . . .

she knew she knew

. . . he had left her lying in her death bed, but what could he do? He was too busy. There were so many noises in his head begging to be . . .

heard

. . . silenced.

Lost in these jingle-jangle thoughts, Son didn't know the man was sitting at the table with him until he spoke.

“You got a light?”

Son came out of his reverie and saw the speaker. A fag, cruising for a one-night stand. The lifestyle screamed from the stranger's tone of voice, the look, the posture. He was slight in body, about thirty, receding hairline that created a sharp widow's peak. He was dressed well in pressed slacks and a cream silk shirt underneath a good quality sports jacket. Son almost said something rude and insulting like do I look gay to you? but thought better of it. He should not turn away a true victim when he presented himself, a gift from the gods.

“Sure, I have a pack of matches here somewhere.” Son felt around in his pants pocket until he brought up the matchbook with “Blue Boa” inscribed in blue gothic letters across the front. He handed it over.

The other man made a production of lighting a cigarette, a Virginia Slim, for chrissakes, one of those mile-long sticks of tobacco for neurotic women. The stranger sucked hard on the filter until he had it going. He handed the matchbook back, but Son shook his head. “Keep it. I don't smoke.”

The fag sighed. “There's so many of you nowadays. We smokers have become second-class citizens, highly discriminated against. So is it all right if I smoke at your table?”

Son said he didn't mind. He almost smiled thinking how a homosexual should be used to being treated in a second-class way, since the minority he belonged to had always gotten the same raw deal from society. But he didn't. He commiserated and helped start the conversation.

It was not long before Son had conned the victim to follow him to his car where they could be afforded a little privacy for the sexual act, the resultant fee having been mutually agreed upon.

~*~

Son had never indulged in a homosexual experience. On the way to the car, he wondered what it might be like. No one would know, what was the difference? If he didn't like it, he could always call a stop at any point during the transaction, couldn't he?

In slang terms, they called it the “kneel and bob,” but in this instance it could have been called the “bend and knock your head—bang, bang—on the steering wheel.” It was horribly uncomfortable and a distinct turnoff. Son's member was as wilted and shrunken as a dead peony. An idea came into his head before things were underway too seriously.

“Let's get out of here and go to my place.”

The other man, going by the improbable name of Cato, rose from where he had his head buried in Son's lap and said, “Oh, God, am I glad you said that. This furtive shit in cars gives me a real pain in the neck. Literally.”

Son grinned, zipped his pants, and started the car. On the way to the house, he talked about being a writer just to pass the time.

“Really? I never met a real published writer before. One of my friends, well, actually he was my former lover, but anyway, he's been working on a book . . .”

Son tuned out. He had heard that a million times. My friend, lover, ex-wife, parent, cousin, grandfather, child is writing a book. Yeah, right. Half the world was writing a book, hear tell it. The sad thing was, they really were. The whole goddamn nation had turned into a land of scribblers. Tell-all books, histories, memoirs, confessions, and a plethora of imaginative novels penned by those who thought they actually knew something to write about. Not that he was any better. Cribbing from the dead didn't exactly make him into a Nobel winner of literature.

What would Cato say if he told him he plagiarized everything?

“So what do you write, westerns, or horror maybe, like Stephen King?”