John looked out the bay window. Night had fallen, and lights gleamed. The lamps were on in Debbie’s apartment, and some of the scented candles—vanilla and strawberry—burned. He looked at his wristwatch, bleary-eyed. It was seventeen minutes before nine o’clock. He had slept for almost four hours!
He stood up. His pants were still down around his ankles, and instantly he tripped on them and fell to the floor again.
“Lucky?” Her voice came from the other room. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah, fine.” He struggled to pull up his pants, zip his zipper, and fasten his belt. This was madness! Insane, sinful madness! He had to get out of here!
He looked at the floor. On the carpet lay Debbie’s red sweater, her blue jeans, wool socks, and the boots she’d been wearing.
“Lucky, will you come in here a minute?” she called.
He pressed his hand to his face. The crab scuttled past his feet and into the kitchen, crawling onto the last few tuna chunks.
“Lucky?” she urged.
He was midway between her bedroom door and the way out. He took two steps toward the way out—and then he stopped, his body trembling like a lightning rod. He smelted the electricity of his own need. At least he could tell her good-bye, he decided. He shouldn’t sneak out like a thief in the night. He turned and walked to the bedroom door, stood at the threshold, and peeked around the corner.
Debbie was sitting at her dresser, applying mascara while she watched herself in the mirror. She wore only the lacy black bra, black underwear and garters, and dark hose with black flowers on them. Her lips were wine-red with freshly applied lipstick, and her cheeks had a rouged glow against her tan. “Hi.” She put down the tube of mascara, one eye done, and smiled at him. “You must’ve been pooped.”
“I was.” His voice sounded strangled.
“I let you sleep. I hope that was okay.”
“Yeah. Fine.” He darted a glance at her breasts and his face bloomed red.
“Do you like to dance?”
“Pardon me?”
There it was again. The etched lines around her lips deepened. “You know: dance. Guess you haven’t heard of dancin’ on your world, huh?”
“No… I mean… I don’t dance.”
“Well, you can fake it. I want to take you somewhere.” She began making up her other eye. “The Mile-High Club. It’s just a few blocks away.”
“A club? No…really. I don’t go to clubs.”
She had to ask it: “Lucky, are you gay?”
“No!”
That was emphasized firmly enough. “Bisexual?”
“No!”
This would be the worst possibility. “How about neuter?”
He paused, mulling that one over. “Maybe,” he finally said.
“Oh, you’re kiddin’ me now! Nice-lookin’ guy like you can’t be neuter. It’d be too much of a fuckin’ waste.” She finished her other eye, then picked up a brush and began to stroke her black mane back over her shoulders. John watched, transfixed; her face was becoming the face of Debra Rocks now, yet there was still something in it that was much softer, much less self-involved than the masked face he’d seen at work in Rough Diamonds. She stood up, walked to her bed, and picked up the black leather skirt that was folded there; she slipped into it and tugged it up over her thighs and rear. “Gainin’ some weight,” she fretted, though she looked perfectly slim and trim to John. She put on a silver-glittered blouse. “Lucky, would you get me my jacket from the closet?” She motioned to it.
John opened the closet door. Inside was a variety of jackets—cloth, mottled camouflage, leather, feathered, leopardskin. “Which one?”
“Guess.”
He knew. He took the leopardskin jacket off its wooden hanger. But he noted something else hanging there: a man’s dark Hue blazer, with a striped tie looped around the hanger’s neck. He gave the leopardskin jacket to her, and she said, “See? I told you we were soul mates.” She slipped it on as if God had molded that particular leopard just for her. She caught his gaze and misinterpreted it. “Oh, it’s not real. I wouldn’t buy a real one. Anyway, somebody gave this to me.”
“Oh.” The man who fit that blue blazer? he wondered.
Debbie put on a pair of black high heels. She walked out of the bedroom, with John following. “You’re gonna like the Mile-High Club,” she told him as she went into the kitchen. “It’s hot. You can go there and dance and nobody fucks with you.” She opened an apple-shaped cookie jar on the kitchen’s counter and began to take out some vanilla wafers, Oreos, and Lorna Doones. “If you don’t want to dance, you can just hang out. No pressure.” She reached down deep into the jar, and her hand emerged with a little cellophane packet of white powder. “I like a club with hot music. Helps you go for the burn.” With a speed born of much practice she brought a small mirror, a razor blade, and a short straw out of a drawer, then carefully sifted some of the powder from the packet onto the glass and formed two thin lines with the blade. “I like the people there, too. They leave you alone when you want to be left alone.” She held her hair back as she sniffed up a line of what John had realized was cocaine.
“Please… Debbie, don’t do that,” he said quickly.
She looked up, a little smear of white at one nostril. “Do what?”
“That. What you’re doing.”
“Oh.” She smiled slyly. “Don’t worry, babe. I’ll leave some toot for you.” She offered him the mirror and cocaine.
He shook his head. “I don’t use drugs.”
Debbie stared at him, puzzled. “How do you live?” she asked, and then she shrugged and inhaled the second white line. When she was done, she opened her black clasp purse, took out a little gold box, and sifted some more of the drug into it. Then put the gold box back into her purse and returned the remaining bit of cocaine in its packet to the cookie jar.
“Ready!” she said, her eyes ablaze with chemical fire.
They went down the stairs. In the vestibule, John paused at his bike—but then Debbie’s hand slid into his, the electric touch destroying his fleeting thought that he was walking on a dangerous edge. She led him to her Fiat, and after he’d gotten in she started the sputtery engine and pulled away from the curb.
About four seconds later, the headlights of a battered gray Volkswagen van parked down the block came on. The van left the curb and followed the Fiat at a steady distance. The van had an Oklahoma license plate.
10
THE MILE-HIGH CLUB WAS another dimension of hell. It was a cavern with black-painted brick walls, and hanging from the ceiling on thin wires were hundreds of plastic airplane models. They swung in the breeze of frenzied motion from the dance floor, and it took John a few minutes to figure out what was peculiar about the models: they all looked scorched, melted, burned-up, and wrecked. And on huge videoscreens, in accompaniment to slamming rock drumbeats and grunting bass guitars, were played over and over scenes of airplane-crash bulletins lifted from TV newscasts. As flames, wreckage, and death filled the screens, John felt Debbie take his hand.
“I want you to meet somebody!” she shouted over the pulsing thunder, and pulled him through the gyrating bodies. Strobe lights flashed, and a small spotlight at the ceiling swiveled to track a particular couple for a few seconds before its cold eye searched for fresh amusement.
John was shaken to the core. He saw women with crew cuts and muscles that would have made a 49er blanch with fear. He saw a man in black panty hose, and another man dancing with him cheek-to-cheek. He saw a leather-jacketed kid with six gold pins in his nose, whirling like a dervish on the dance floor. He saw a black woman kiss a white woman on the mouth, and then the wet gleam of their tongues as the spotlight caught them.
His knees almost gave way, but if he fell on that dance floor he knew he’d be trampled under combat boots, spike heels, and gladiator sandals. His hand tightened around Debbie’s, and she led him out of the confusion. Booths were crowded with shadowy figures, black light sparkling on Day-Glo-d
aubed, blown-up black-and-whites of airplane-crash pictures. She led him toward a booth and waved at somebody.
Four people were intertwined in a booth, legs and arms pretzeled together. “Big Georgia!” Debbie called. “I want you to meet my new friend! This is Lucky.”
John found himself staring at a beautiful, big-boned, red-haired woman who wore black eye shadow and lipstick. Her hair was the color of flame, and cascaded down over her breasts and shoulders. Big Georgia looked him up and down, starting with his crotch, and stared him forcefully in the eyes. She licked slowly along her pouting lower lip. “He looks like he enjoys sufferin’,” she said.
Except it was a man’s husky voice, with a Deep South drawl.
“Lucky’s all right,” Debbie explained. “He’s my good-luck charm.”
“Any friend of Debbie’s is a rear end of mine,” Big Georgia said, and batted his eyes at John. Then he turned his attention to Debbie. “Honey, you are lookin’ soooo fine! You use those diet pills I gave you?”
“Oh, yeah. They were bitchin’.”
“You got any more weight to lose?”
“Yeah.” Debbie patted her flat stomach. “A little bit right here.”
“Try these, then.” Big Georgia reached down into his beaded purse and the black-nailed hand came out with a little bottle. “They’ll melt that bad shit right off you, honey.”
John felt himself slipping into a trance, as if his mind had become a dial tone. Debbie immediately shook a small white pill into her mouth and sipped from the glass of chablis Big Georgia offered. The man sitting next to Big Georgia had a hand on a breast, and on that hand was a large tattooed spider.
“You workin’, honey?” Big Georgia inquired, and Debbie said quickly, “Yeah! Commercials! You know. Like the other TV work I’ve been doin’.”
“Oh.” Big Georgia glanced at John, and the redhead’s heavy-lidded eyes narrowed with comprehension. “I like to do a little TV work myself.”
John realized Debbie didn’t want him knowing about the porno movies, though Big Georgia certainly seemed to understand her true line of work. They talked on, just chitchat about fashions and shoes and such, and then John had a new sensation.
Someone was staring holes through him.
He was certain of it. And it was no one at the booth, either; they were all either bored silly or listening to Debbie and Big Georgia. He looked to his left and looked to his right. Just shadows, merged and moving.
He turned and looked toward the dance floor.
A tall, lean figure stood there at the dance floor’s edge, silhouetted by the explosion of strobe lights.
A spotlight swept past, brushing the figure’s face. A man, John saw it was. Maybe. Anyway, whoever it was had blond crew-cut hair and wore a long coat. The man—presumably—just stood there, hands resting on his hips. Maybe one of Debbie’s friends, John thought. He sincerely hoped not.
When John’s attention went to Debbie again, she was just putting the little gold box back in her purse. “Let’s dance!” she told him eagerly, flecks of white on her upper lip.
“No. Really, I can’t—” But she was already pulling him toward the dance floor. He saw that the man with the blond crew cut had vanished.
“Work his ass, Debbie!” Big Georgia hollered. Then, in a quieter voice to his companion, “I know I’d like to.”
Debbie guided him into the midst of the bodies that crashed and thrashed under the spinning lights. The music was deafening, and Debbie shouted something at him but he couldn’t hear a syllable of it. Then she stepped back, elbowing room for herself, put her hands behind her hips, and began to grind with a sensuous rhythm that would have knocked Lazarus dead again. All John could do was stand there and stare at her hips, as a high-pitched singer moaned about somebody dressed in peach and black and you’ve got the look.
John felt insane, standing at the center of insanity. The strobes flashed and the spotlights swept back and forth, and then the singer was wailing about slamming and ramming. Debbie grasped John’s hips and tried to get him shaking, but he had the movements of a swamp log.
Somebody shoved John aside.
A man stepped in front of him and began to thrust his pelvis energetically at Debbie. John saw a guy with curly black hair and a face like a chiseled Italian statue, wearing skintight jeans and a white sweater. Debbie glanced at John, then back to the new dancer—and in that instant John saw her face change.
The hardness poured back into it—but it was a sexy, ruthless hardness, and it made her mouth curl and sneer with cruel lust. Her tongue flicked along her lower lip, she arched her back and moaned, and her hands swept upward through her black hair, disrupting it into wild waves. Her eyes blazed with a fire that John feared would explode his bones if she ever turned its heat directly on him. He stepped back, stunned, and he knew he was seeing Debra Rocks emerge from the skin of Debbie Stoner.
The Italian guy pumped his hips, and Debra Rocks slid down his legs like a cat, her face level with his crotch.
A spotlight zigzagged across the crowd and locked on them. The other dancers melted back, as if they too had been scorched, and a ring of people gaped and shouted as Debra Rocks turned her power to full burn.
She was lying on the floor now, her body writhing, and the Italian guy was on top of her, right over her mouth, in a dancing display of oral lust. She came up off the floor, back arching with supple strength, pressing her thighs toward the man’s face. He grasped her hips, picked her up, and she locked her legs around him. They spun and twisted in the blue-tinged light, Debra Rocks gripping his hair and flicking her tongue across his forehead. The drumbeat rhythm was a primal call, animal to animal, and John saw her eyes flare with desire, her offered tongue straining toward the Italian’s. The heat of her glare blinded John as if he had looked at an atomic-bomb blast.
The place was going crazy, people hollering, clapping, and stomping to the beat. The floor shook, in danger of becoming the Mile-Low Club. Debra Rocks was on her feet again, her hips going around and around as she urged the Italian on. He clung to her legs, his tongue darting at her black flowers. Sweat glistened on her face, and on his too, and they locked fingers and Debra Rocks ground her crotch over the man’s gasping mouth.
John felt a tide of sickness in his stomach. Someone shoved him further away from the inner ring, and he staggered back. Collided with another body, and heard God’s name taken in vain as he was pushed off the dance floor like a loose sack of yesterday’s news.
He saw a sign on the wall—PEE, followed by an arrow. He thought he was going to throw up, and he had to get to the men’s room fast. He hurried in the direction of the arrow, down a black corridor and through a red door, and there were the urinals and toilet stalls. He staggered into one of the stalls, closed the door, and leaned over the toilet. Cigarette butts floated in murky water before his face. He was shivering, covered with cold sweat, and he waited for what was going to happen as the brutal blast of drums made the walls tremble.
He heard the red door open and close. Heard the sound of boots clocking on the slick linoleum. The footsteps stopped.
Outside the stall, Travis slid the Colt .45 from his holster. His eyes were as dead as ashes, and they had watched this man enter the bathroom alone. Travis extended his arm, aiming the Colt at the center of the stall’s door. He eased back the hammer; it made a solid, powerful click.
John heard it and looked up from the toilet bowl. What was that noise?
The cowboy’s finger tightened on the trigger.
“Man, that’s one hot bitch!” somebody said, coming through the red door. His companion belched beer and said, “I’d lay her down and fuck her bowlegged, I swear it!” as he unzipped his pants en route to a urinal.
Just that fast, Travis considered the options. He would have to kill all three of them. Where was the back door here? How could he get out? In a split second he’d made his decision.
The pearl-handled pistol spun around his finger and slid back into the hol
ster, and the two men who’d just entered with beer-swollen bladders hadn’t even seen a blur.
Travis knew there would be a next time.
He abruptly turned and stalked out of the bathroom.
John hadn’t thrown up yet. His stomach still raged, but he wasn’t going to be sick after all. Still, he waited to make sure all was clear in his digestive tract. Cold sweat sparkled on his face, but that began to subside too. He drew a few deep breaths to clear his head, but the toilet’s odors didn’t exactly help. He wiped his face with a piece of tissue, and then he left the stall and returned to the hellish den beyond.
Debbie was nowhere to be seen. And neither, John realized with mounting alarm, was the Italian stud. The dance floor was jammed again, the bodies moving like a hydra. John searched for Debbie, and found himself heading back toward the booth where Big Georgia held sway.
“Where’d Debbie go?” he asked, still light-headed.
“She was lookin’ for you. Thought you’d left her. So she left too.” Big Georgia shrugged, and smiled mischievously. “And not alone.”
“Oh.” The bottom of his stomach seemed to fall away, and an immense pit opened. “I was just…gone for a few minutes!”
“What Debbie can do in a few minutes you wouldn’t want to know.” Big Georgia leaned forward, showing those pendulous breasts. She smiled sweetly. “Would you like a Southern girl, you big hunk of damn Yankee?”
John decided it would be expedient to be gone with the wind. He made his way out of the Mile-High Club and, at the curb, stood in the chilly dark staring at the empty space where Debbie’s Fiat had been. The breath whistled from his lungs like air from a punctured tire. Down deep, somewhere underneath the heart, he felt a knife-twist of pure agony.
Well, what did I expect? he asked himself. True love? He had eaten the apple, and was left was a seed-clogged throat. Even the very air around the Mile-High Club seemed fouled. To inhale much of it would poison the soul.
Damn, he thought, and began walking in search of a cab. I thought she liked me.