Chapter 23
I HAD a few hours to kill before I’d have to pick up Brenda Sanderson for her shift at Pickin’s. I was feeling a little weary and a nap suddenly sounded very good. Besides, I wanted to see if Robbie was around the apartment. We definitely needed to talk. Then I’d take Daisy out for her dinner and grab a bite myself. A greasy burger and some decidedly unhealthy French fries sounded good.
I got home in record time and patted Daisy as I got the feel of the atmosphere. Robbie was there, although he wasn’t visible. I went to the bedroom and plopped down on the bed, still fully clothed. Just as I got comfortable the familiar cold sensation hit me, and Robbie materialized on the bed next to me. He glanced over at me sheepishly.
“What’s up?” he asked.
I laughed. “Not much. Looks like I’ve finished with one case. Now I’ve just got to escort a stripper to work every night until her mother tires of paying me. How have you been?”
He shrugged. “Same. Want to talk about last night?”
“Not much to say. I’m not mad at you, if that’s what you’re wondering. I just can’t believe you never told me in all these years that you could have sex with another ghost.”
“It’s not the easiest thing to bring up in conversation. ‘Hey, did you know ghosts can fuck?’ Honestly I never thought it would be important.” He was quiet for a few seconds. “Sorry about ruining your date. I was being a dick.”
“It’s okay.”
“He probably thinks you are bonkers.”
“I’m pretty sure he does. I tried to get him to believe I was talking on my cell phone. I could tell he didn’t buy it.” I shifted onto my side so I could look Robbie in the face. “I’m going to ask him over and try to explain to him that I like him but that we need to just be friends for now. You okay with that?”
Robbie sighed. “You shouldn’t let me… I mean, if you really want to… fuck, I don’t know what I’m saying.”
“It’s what I want for now. I don’t want a relationship right now. I already have one.”
Smiling, Robbie stroked my cheek. He wasn’t fully corporeal and it felt like I was being stroked by a feather. Still, it was nice. “I love you,” he said. “And I’m so sorry for—”
“Forget it. I understand.”
We lay there for several minutes. I wanted more than anything else to embrace him. To be honest, I wanted more than an embrace. Since that wasn’t going to happen I sighed and turned onto my back and stared at the ceiling.
Like I said, I’m not psychic, but every now and then I get impressions. I don’t know what triggers them, and they don’t happen often, but when they do they hit me like a jolt. Suddenly I had a feeling of impending danger. Something was in the air, and it wasn’t a good something. The only thing I had to do was to take Brenda Sanderson to work and sit there while she jiggled for salivating heteros. What could be dangerous about that?
Of course, there was the unknown killer who had already murdered two strippers. Was he going to strike again? My bones told me that it was a distinct possibility. And since the feeling of danger was directed at me, it could mean that he would be at Pickin’s or in the vicinity, waiting for his next victim. I sat up.
“Robbie, would you come with me to the strip club tonight?”
He raised himself up on an elbow. “Is your Spidey-sense tingling?”
“Like it never has before.”
“I wouldn’t be able to go inside,” he reminded me.
“That’s fine. I’d just want you to hang around. Keep an eye on the parking lot, that sort of thing. Watch out for any suspicious characters.”
Robbie grinned and pressed his lips up to mine. I couldn’t really feel them, but it was a nice gesture. “Batman and Robin are back in action,” he said.
While waiting for Daisy to chomp her dinner at the park, I called Nick. I asked him if he’d be willing to come over Wednesday night. He hesitated, not that I blame him, so I quickly explained that I needed to let him know what was going on in my head. He agreed to come. I did warn him we’d have to make an early night of it, as I’d have to escort Brenda once again to the strip club.
“Wow,” he said, “driving a stripper to work every night.”
“And back home,” I added. “Makes for a late night.”
“The life of a detective is never boring.”
“Don’t you believe it.”
By the time I dropped Daisy back at the apartment it was time to go get Brenda. I never did get my nap. Oh, well. I drove to Gimber Street.
When I knocked at the door the sun was just going down. The rain had stopped, but the air had stayed cool. I wore a windbreaker which nicely covered my shoulder holster but wasn’t really heavy enough for the weather. The door was opened by a blond boy of about fifteen or sixteen. I hadn’t seen him before. I wondered if they had a steady stream of kids running through the house or if they just traded kids whenever they got tired of the lot they had. This one was wearing shorts way down on his hips so that his underwear showed. He glared at me. “Yeah?”
“I’m here to pick up Brenda.”
He shut the door without a word. A few minutes later both Brenda and Derek appeared. “It’s okay if Derek comes along, isn’t it?” Brenda asked. She was wearing jeans torn at both knees and a big, bulky jacket with the Pickin’s logo on the back. “He was going to come by later, but his car isn’t working too well, and I figured it would be okay if he rode with us.”
Derek smiled at me. “How’s the zombie dog?” he asked.
“She’s fine. How’s the wound?”
He looked down at his leg. “All healed. You can’t even tell there was a chunk missing.” He pulled up his pant leg before I could tell him I didn’t need the visual aid. The skin on his calf where Daisy had sunk in her teeth was still pale but otherwise unblemished. I told them I was glad and herded them to the car. They seemed to think it odd when I put them both in the back seat. They thought it odder when I explained that it was because my boyfriend was in the passenger seat.
As I started the motor, Derek laughed and said, “You’ve got a zombie dog. Are you also dating the invisible man?” Neither of them could see any trace of Robbie, obviously.
I glanced over at him. Robbie was wearing an old Mother Hubbard’s Pizza T-shirt and a light blue jacket. I glanced in the rear view and saw they were both looking ahead, wondering what the hell was going on.
“This is my old boyfriend, Robbie,” I said as an introduction. “He’s been dead for just about ten years now.”
“Ten years ago this October,” Robbie agreed.
Brenda was looking around anxiously. “What are you talking about?” Some people could hear him or at least see a dark shadow where he was, but she wasn’t one of those people. Neither, apparently, was Derek, who looked confused. I returned my eyes to the road.
“Trust me; he’s here.”
“You’re saying there’s a ghost in the car with us?” Derek asked.
Robbie turned in his seat and wiggled a few fingers at them. “Hiya,” he said. There was no reaction. He shrugged and turned back. “Philistines,” he muttered.
Derek leaned forward. “You mean he’s right here? In the seat right there? Why can’t we see him?”
“Jesus, I hate it when people talk about me like I’m not here,” Robbie said. “It’s so rude.”
I knew he was kidding, but I wasn’t in the mood. I spoke to the duo in the back. “He’s going to keep an eye outside tonight. Watch for suspicious characters.”
Robbie frowned. “Around a strip club? Hell, everyone walking in acts suspiciously.”
“You know what I mean.”
Derek ran a hand over the passenger seat, his arm going right through Robbie’s chest. “Whoa,” he said. “It’s wicked cold right there.”
“Would you ask him not to do that?” Robbie asked me. “It’s fucking rude.”
“It’s cold because you just put your arm right through him,” I explained. “Don’t do it again. It annoys him.”
“So there’s actually a ghost in the car with us!” Derek was excited by the prospect. Brenda still just looked perplexed.
“I’m out of here,” Robbie told me. “I’ll be outside the club. If you need me, just pop out and shout.” He vanished quickly before Derek could repeat his hand movements. Derek enthusiastically poked his head between the front seats to see if he could find any trace of the specter.
“He’s gone now,” I told him.
It wasn’t entirely true. Just for a second Robbie’s reflection showed up in the rear view mirror. He was flipping the bird in Derek’s direction.
It took me quite a while to understand how ghosts actually move about. I suppose I was influenced by watching the Alistair Sim version of A Christmas Carol as a kid, but I assumed that ghosts could just fly around in the air like Casper from place to place. Not true. Vanishing from the car, Robbie would just be out on the street and would have to walk the rest of the way to Pickin’s. Luckily we were close. He could do this invisibly to save energy, but he’d still have to make the trek on his own. Strangely, at his usual haunt—i.e., our apartment—he could vanish at will and just reappear in other parts of the house. When I asked him about this, he couldn’t really explain why. “I think it’s just a familiarity thing,” he’d told me.
I didn’t worry about Robbie. I knew he’d be there when I needed him. As always. I pulled into the side parking lot of Pickin’s and found a spot. I got out first and scanned the area before I allowed Brenda to get out. Gotta earn my paycheck, after all. Everything looked fine. The three of us headed inside.
The same brawny guy was working the door who had been there my first night at Pickin’s. I’d already talked with the owner and explained to him that I’d be escorting Brenda to and fro and that I’d be packing, so Brawny wasn’t surprised by my shoulder holster. Brenda kissed Derek and started off to the dressing rooms or whatever they had backstage but stopped about halfway and darted back.
“I forgot to tell you,” she said to me, taking my hand in hers and squeezing it. “Mom’s getting us an apartment. We’re moving into the Whitcomb Towers this week. Isn’t that fantastic!”
I guess Ma Sanderson had listened to my advice after all. Maybe I should change my name to Dr. Joyce Brothers. “That’s great,” I said.
“We get the keys Wednesday. I can’t wait. Our own place! I’m taking tomorrow night off so we can pack, so you don’t have to pick me up.” Brenda realized she was still holding my hand and let it go with an embarrassed look. “I think we owe you quite a lot, Mr. Duncan Andrews.”
I just smiled. Brenda gave me a quick peck on the cheek and then scampered off.
The crowd that night was on the thin side, and most of the guys were clumped around the areas where the girls danced. Most of the tables were vacant, so I picked one of those and sat down. Derek sat with me. The guy at the table nearest us had passed out with his head on the table, lying in a pool of his own sick. No one seemed to be with him, and no one showed any inclination to help him. Neither did Derek or I, to be honest, so I shouldn’t cast aspersions.
After a bit Brenda’s stage name was announced, and she came out to take her place on the bar. Derek beamed. “She’s pretty, ain’t she?”
“Pretty as a picture.” The busty waitress came over. Or was she a bar maid? Whatever. Since I was working, I ordered a Diet Pepsi. It was going to be a long night. I hated the music, I hated the dancing, and I didn’t have anything to say to Derek. I made a mental note to get a book of crossword puzzles to bring with me next time.
A little later the several Diets I’d had ganged up on me and a journey to the restroom was in order. I told Derek to keep an eye on Brenda and moseyed over to the men’s room. The men’s room was crowded and filthy. Most of the floor seemed to be covered in urine. The walls were painted dark to hide (unsuccessfully) the grime. Two overhead lights were out, giving the restroom an odd ambiance. The dark walls and dim lighting made it seem like how I’ve always imagined an English gentleman’s club to be. Well, one that had been peed all over.
Luckily one urinal was free. I stood and did my business, looking ahead at a small frosted window that was slightly above eye level. As I was finishing I heard a muffled voice come from the other side of the window. “Duncan! Can you hear me?” It was Robbie.
I would have answered, but I was reluctant to cause the men on either side of me to believe I’d lost my mind. For their part, they seemed not to have heard Robbie’s voice. I myself wondered how he had known I was standing there.
“Tap on the window if you can hear me,” Robbie said.
I tried to reach up as casually as possible. I attempted to make it look like I was stretching. I rapped my signet ring twice on the glass. The guy to my left flashed me a worried look before he hurried away from the urinals. He must have thought I was a cop signaling for the place to be raided. He didn’t even bother to zip up.
“I read you,” Robbie said. “I need you to meet me outside ASAP.”
I returned to the table. I leaned down so I wouldn’t have to shout at Derek over the music. “I need you to keep an eye on Brenda. Robbie needs me outside for something.”
Derek had had several beers by this point, but his eyes were clear, and he seemed alert. He nodded. “Be careful,” he said.
I went outside and circled the building. It was fairly quiet except for two drunks who were helping each other to their car in the side parking lot. I wondered which was going to attempt to drive and then realized it wouldn’t matter. They’d either end up splattered across their windshield or stopped by the cops. Hopefully the latter.
I found Robbie around back, near the frosted restroom window. He was hopping from foot to foot in anticipation of my arrival. When I got close enough to hear, he said, “I saw the killer!”
“Where?”
He pointed. Behind Pickin’s was a long, dark alley. On one side was the back of a small, mostly disused strip mall, and on the other side was a fenced-in storage facility. “Down there. A guy in black was lurking around. I got as close as I could and—get this—he could see me! I mean, he turned and snarled at me! He freaking snarled at me!”
“When was this?”
Robbie had to force himself to slow his words down so that he was comprehensible. “Just a few minutes ago. He was dressed in black, taller than me, and had one of those pockmarked faces. You know, like he’d had smallpox or something when he’d been a kid. There was also a nasty, gross-looking scab on his cheek. That street lamp at the end of the alley showed his face clearly. I could see the pus in the wound! It was so….”
Now wasn’t the time for the play by play report. “Where did he go?” I asked.
Robbie pointed. “Soon as he saw me he took off down the alley.”
I moved, making my way quickly but cautiously down the alley. The night was quiet save for the chirping of some kind of insect. Robbie kept up with me, but only with effort. Because of the energy he was expending, just his head and torso were visible. He looked odd bobbing about in mid-air with only part of him there. I couldn’t worry about him, though. My senses were reaching out for any sign of our mysterious killer. I was getting the faintest of traces, but that was about all. The killer had been down the alley, but I felt that he had moved on now and was far away. When we got to the end of the alley which opened onto a side street in a residential neighborhood, I felt we’d lost our quarry. I was getting no sense of anything out of the ordinary. Either he was long gone, or my Spidey-sense had conked out. There was a dog barking somewhere nearby, angered at the noise we were making, but no other sounds. I stopped and looked around. Columbo would have found a fragment of the killer’s clothing snagged onto a nearby bush or something. I couldn’t see squat. I looked at Robbie. “Any ideas?”
He was now just a faint face floating in the air. His head moved a little, and I think he was shrugging. It’s hard to tell a shrug when you can’t see shoulders. “Do you think he circled around or something? Maybe he’s back at the strip club.”
I tried to get the geography of the area into my head. The side street we were on must be Winton. “There’s another strip club around here, isn’t there?” I asked. “Over on Crawfordsville Road?”
“Don’t know. Strip clubs aren’t really my area of expertise.” Even his voice was getting faint. Poor kid. He was on his last reserves.
“Why don’t you go and rest,” I told him. “I’m going to track this bastard down.”
His dark eyes looked worried. “Be careful.”
“I will be.”
His face became a thin white mist which quickly dissipated. I got out my cell phone and called the operator. I told her I needed the name and address of a strip club on Crawfordsville Road. I expected a delay or at least some questions, but she came up with the goods right away. Maybe she was fan of strip clubs. I was committing the address to memory when something caught my eye. The alley I was in bisected another alley that ran behind a row of houses. A small garage faced me and in front of the garage was a dark shape. I had noticed it previously but hadn’t given it much thought, assuming it was just an oil stain or something. Now as I took a better look I could see that it resembled a huddled shape. I disconnected with the operator and walked over. There was a massive stain, all right, but it wasn’t oil. It was blood. And the huddled form was a woman’s body.
The blood looked black in the moonlight and there was a hell of a lot of it. So much, in fact, that it was difficult to see any details of the victim. It was a woman in her middle to late twenties. She had been a redhead. Beyond that I couldn’t say. Her clothes were for the most part sliced away as were large portions of her skin. The killer had done his job well. The abdomen was gutted, and she had a gash extending up from the sternum to her throat, which was also slashed. From what I could see it looked like most of her intestines had been pulled out. The end result did not look human.
I called 911.
I LEFT the tip anonymously, partly because I didn’t want to be a witness to a second murder. Lieutenant Carson may have a soft spot in his heart for me, but even he wouldn’t be able to keep me from spending all night at the police station answering questions. Also I wanted to catch the bastard, if I could, and I didn’t want to be slowed down. I backtracked a little and got out of the alley. A short walk brought me to Crawfordsville Road. I was only a block or so away from the Winner’s Barn, the strip club the operator had told me about. My brain felt like it was on fire. My hunch that the killer would strike tonight had come true, so I was sticking to my hunches. And my hunches were telling me to head to this club. It was a long shot, but if I was wrong who cared? Hell, I’d come across two freshly sliced corpses in the last week or so. Who else could make that claim?
The Winner’s Barn (so named due to the proximity to the Indianapolis Speedway and the shape of the building itself) was set back a bit from the road. Their sound system must have been a beaut. Even at the far edge of the parking lot I could hear the thump thump of the music. The lot was about three-quarters full. Four guys of college age were heading inside. Other than that I could see no one.
I started to circle the building, looking for any mysterious shadows or, better, some guy dressed in black with a bloody knife in his hands. I found a stray dog sniffing around a trash Dumpster, but it ran off when I approached. The air conditioning unit on the roof of the Winner’s Barn was making quite a din. A loose belt or something was making an ear-splitting whine. A scream wouldn’t be heard by anyone inside. Not that there was anyone but me around to scream.
I looked around, hoping to catch a trace of movement to investigate. Nothing. Finally I decided to give up and headed back around to the front entrance. My shoulders slumped a little. Apparently my Spidey-sense wasn’t as fine-tuned as I thought. As I rounded the corner to the front I saw a woman standing by the curb on Crawfordsville getting ready to open the passenger door of a black sedan. The way she was peering into the window sent warning bells jangling in my brain. Everything about her body language told me she was accepting a ride from a stranger. And my Spidey-sense told me this wasn’t a stranger one could feel safe accepting a ride from.
I pulled my gun out of the holster and flicked off the safety. I kept it down by my side out of sight just in case I was wrong. “Excuse me, miss,” I called out. I was walking fast but still had half the parking lot to traverse.
The woman, who was black and had the biggest afro I’d ever seen, turned to glare at me. She had opened the door and still had her hand on the handle. I was close enough now to see the dark shape of the driver. He had lowered his head to get a good look at me. I brought my .38 into view, just in case.
The driver suddenly accelerated. The woman yanked her hand away with a yelp as the passenger door swung shut. I ran the last few yards and fired a shot, aiming for the rear tires. My second shot put a hole in the rear windshield. The car’s brakes screamed as the driver maneuvered a rapid U-turn. I thought for a moment he was going for the woman with the intent to run her over. The car veered toward me, however, jolting over the curb into the parking lot. The headlights were blinding, but I figured I had time for one last shot before the sedan would run me over. I fired and threw myself to the side. I felt the whoosh of the speeding vehicle as it missed my hip by mere centimeters. I rolled, intending to rise right back up, but I collided with one of those damn cement bars that mark the end of a parking space. With my rhythm totally off kilter, I scrambled to my feet just as the car disappeared around the corner.
The woman was not a happy camper. She was holding her injured hand, her eyes wide as saucers. “What the fucking hell is going on?” she demanded.
I dusted myself off and holstered my gun. “I just saved your life. Did you get a good look at the driver?”
“You some kind of cop or something?” The way she said it cops were several notches lower than cockroaches.
“Yeah,” I said. The “or something” fit, so I wasn’t lying.
She shook her head, making the big afro quiver like a mass of cotton candy. “I didn’t see nothing.”
I could feel a bruise forming on my hip from where I’d hit the concrete parking bumper and my windbreaker was torn at the elbow. I really didn’t want to deal with her at the moment, but some extra info wouldn’t be a bad thing. “If you could just give me a description of the driver—”
“He was just a regular guy. Brown hair. Looked regular, you know?” Her head shaking continued. “It was hard to get a good look at him. He was in the shadows mostly. Hey, I was just wanting a ride home. I don’t need this shit. My car broke down the other day, and they want $400 to fix the fucking thing. It ain’t even worth….”
She had more to say, but I stopped listening. If she worked at the Winner’s Barn I could always look her up later if needed, although I doubted that would come up. I turned from her in mid-tirade and limped back to Pickin’s.