He frowned and looked at his watch. “Uh… no, brother, it doesn’t start for another—.”
He stopped talking when I screwed the barrel of my Glock into his ear.
People tend to do that.
“Be smart,” I told him.
He froze into a statue, eyes wide, sweat bursting from the pores on his face.
“Where’s the girl?” I asked. I kept my voice low and level, letting the gun do all of my shouting for me.
I had no idea if he knew anything about anything, but sometimes you go on balls and instinct and a flip of a coin. Most of the times you waste your time. Once in a while though…
“She’s still upstairs,” he said.
I pressed the barrel harder against him. “Is she alive?”
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Her fairy godfather. Answer the fucking question.”
He hedged. “Yes,” he said. But there was too much uncertainty in his voice. “They’re getting her ready.”
It was a simple statement that in any other circumstances might have meant something relatively innocent. But it filled my mind with terrible images and awful potential.
“How many are up there?”
His eyes shifted away and I knew he was about to lie to me. Before he could push us both out onto a ledge, I leaned close and whispered. “I don’t mind blowing your head off, slick. You have one chance to walk out of this, but you’re on a short fuse here.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “God’s honest truth. I only came on shift twenty minutes ago and some of them were already up there. Only about a dozen members have checked in.”
A dozen was the number of men I’d seen leaving the action outside.
I moved in front of him and put the barrel under his chin. I wanted to see his eyes better when I asked the next question.
“Do you know what they’re going to do to her?”
His mouth opened but it made a lot of shapes before he finally spoke, trying on different answers, seeing if any of them fit well enough.
“I’m just a grunt, man,” he said at last. “I just work the door.”
I leaned close to him and took his scent, sniffing at his face and chest the way a dog would. The gun stayed in place as I sniffed and I could see the total confusion on his face. He must have thought I was some nutcase. Sniffing like a dog.
I smelled fear on him. I smelled booze and tobacco and hashish. I smelled sweat and sex and blood.
And I smelled Bambi.
Not her blood scent.
Her living scent. The subtle perfume of hormones and skin oils and glands. The scent I’d picked up at her apartment.
He’d been close enough to her to get that scent on his clothes.
No blood, though.
No blood.
It was the only reason I didn’t kill him right there and then.
But it was a damn close decision.
Instead I kneed him in the nuts as hard as I could. His eyes bulged, his mouth puckered into a tiny Oh and he caved forward, cupping his balls. As he bent down over the pain, I clubbed him on the back of the neck, right where the spine enters the skull. It jerks the brain stem and short-circuits the nerve conduction. In the movies James Bond chops a guy there and the man goes out and wakes up ten minutes later with a headache. I’m not James Bond and this wasn’t the movies. He dropped like he’d been pole-axed, and when he woke up — maybe half an hour from now — he’d puke, he’d be dizzy and dazed, and he’d probably have neck problems for years.
Fuck it.
Behind me the door clicked as someone else used their keycard. I lunged toward a set of light switches and slapped them down just as the door opened. A man-shape filled the doorway, pausing in confusion at the unexpected darkness. I grabbed a fistful of his tie and jerked him into the hall, then kicked the door shut. The guy was a businessman in a nice wool suit. About my age, a little bigger, a whole lot richer.
I punched him in the throat.
He dropped, gagging and coughing, clawing at his neck.
The security guard said, “Hey!”
That was all I allowed him to say. I grabbed him by the tie and jerked that as tight as a noose while putting my foot as far through his nutsack as I could manage.
He said, “Oooooof,” in a high, squeaky voice. I used the necktie to pull him into the hallway. I took a one-second look to see if anyone in the main hall noticed any of this, but both couples onstage were going at it loud and weird, and the band’s speakers were cranked all the way up to eleven. No one saw shit.
I slammed the door, pivoted and kicked the key-swipe station off the wall.
The businessman was thrashing around on the floor trying to breathe. The security guy was on his knees, eyes popped nearly out of his head, face purple. I gave him a little bit of a shuffle side-thrust and he flopped back into bad dreams. Then I turned and kicked the businessman in the jewels and in the face. He groaned, rolled over and passed out.
It was suddenly very quiet in the hallway.
I was doing some real damage here and a small splinter of my mind was watching, aghast. The rest of me was remembering the faceless faces of the sixteen dead women, and the boy who’d been stripped of his life and nailed to a wall. And remembering the smell of Bambi, still alive, on the one guard’s clothes.
So, yeah, sure, compassion and all that. But not now and not for these guys. They were lucky I hadn’t wolfed out and really gone to town on them, and believe me that was a very strong temptation.
I paused to listen. If anyone upstairs heard the commotion they weren’t reacting. There was music drifting down the stairs. Drums and some kind of pipes. Very tribal. Voices, too. Some kind of chanting.
Ever since I spoke with Jonatha Corbiel-Newton my overactive brain had been conjuring a series of ugly pictures of what was going on here at Club Dante. I suppose the most dominant one was of frat boys going through some bullshit pseudo-ancient ritual before gang-banging Bambi and carving her skin off, all in some crazy belief that Moloch — fallen angel, demon or half-ass ancient god — was going to make them rich.
I shoved the businessman against the door and then dragged the unconscious guards over. That was more than a quarter ton of dead weight. If anyone tried to get the door open they could manage it, but not in the next five minutes.
Better for them if they didn’t.
Then I spun around and ran up the stairs.
I took the stairs two at a time, fast but quiet, thinking to myself, Hold on, kid. Hold on.
There was one more door at the top and one more key-swipe. I chopped the card down through it and then made myself slow down. I eased the door open and slipped quietly inside. The chamber was big, as wide as downstairs though with fifteen-foot high ceilings. Lights in recessed alcoves provided minimal illumination, but overall the room was dark. Shadows lay draped across everything. I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment to goose along my night vision.
When I opened them I saw that there were at least twenty men in the room. Most of them were clustered around an open cabinet as one of the staff handed out robes of dark red silk. The men were stripping out of their expensive suits and then pulling the robes on over their naked skin. The expectation of what was about to happen must have been electric because some of the guys had hard-ons. I didn’t need to see that.
Music blared from at least a dozen speakers mounted high on the walls. It was the tribal stuff I’d heard downstairs, and the chanting was actually part of it. The guys here weren’t chanting. No idea what language the chant was in. Not Latin. Not anything I’d ever heard.
I faded into deep shadows thrown by a tall wooden carving. When I glanced up at it I was surprised to see that it was a bull. Kind of. The body was human, but the shoulders were massively overdeveloped and the head was that of a massive bull with long horns. I glanced around to see that there were other statues like this one. Not exactly like it, and some made out of stone or metal, but all of a gigantic bull-headed man. A minotaur? I wasn’t sure. My knowledge of mythology was pretty thin.