Okay, so here's the next installment of
CAFFEINATED FICTION...it was difficult to finish this week, I admit, just because I'm getting ready to move again, and am thus in the 'bouncing off the walls' stage where it's hard to focus long enough to get much done.
Since the move is still about a week off, I'm not expecting that to diminish at all...but only to get worse. I'm now in that unfortunate period where the move is too close for me to be able to really delve into any new projects, but too far away for me to be able to get away with doing NOTHING, either, at least not without driving myself and everyone in my near vicinity completely bat-sh** crazy.
So, that being said...here is Chapter Seven of the new Gate-Shifters book, tentatively entitled CRASH-MORPH...
Usual Disclaimer for Caffeinated Fiction: This work (overall, maybe not this particular segment) contains adult content, including sexual situations, swearing and possibly even some actual (gasp!) sex. So...ye be forewarned! Otherwise, the usual things for a work in progress (WIP): there will be typos (definitely), maybe structural issues, continuity gaps, plot holes and whatever else. So if that kind of thing is going to drive you nuts, or make you grind your teeth excessively, I suggest you not read this sucker until it's gone through the editorial process and been made all nice and clean and pretty on the other side. :)
Chapter Seven:
Misty’s Boom-Boom Room
I spent the next day at the modeling agency.
I managed to leave Jake at home that time, although several of the gazelle-like models asked me about him once they recognized me, which told me that my ‘disguise’ really hadn’t been as effective as I had hoped. The down-the-nose looks I got from a couple of those same models told me that Jake hadn’t been wrong about their clothing snobbery, either.
Still, I didn’t much care about my popularity in the fashion crowd.
Hell, this was Seattle. I was practically a fashionista compared to most people in this city. I wasn’t even wearing a hoodie today.
Madame Culare herself wasn’t around most of the morning, so her assistant led me to the back room, so I could go through more of their client files, including some of the shows they’d sponsored and open calls for talent. The assistant herself seemed thrilled to see me for some reason, despite my skinny jeans and loose-hanging band t-shirt and motorcycle boots.
I couldn’t help noticing that she’d switched up her own look, too.
Instead of the previous, Blade Runner attire and weirdly plastic hairstyle from the 1940s, she reminded me more of Jessica Rabbit today, complete with shocking red hair that flowed in soft curls around her shoulders, and a low-cut, red satin dress that hung in an asymmetrical line from above her knees in front to down somewhere to mid-calf in the back. It was definite ‘va-voom’ wear, but I was beginning to think she was gay, honestly, because she definitely seemed to be batting her eyes more at me than she ever had at Jake.
I wasn’t sure if I should just let it go and be flattered, or if I should be seriously reassessing the relative butchy-ness of my own clothing.
I hadn’t told Nik where I was going, but I hadn’t last time, either, and he still showed up on the sidewalk outside the Darth Vader building.
So I guess I shouldn’t have been all that surprised when he appeared at the door of the modeling agency’s back room only about two hours after I did, Jessica Rabbit in tow.
He’d left with Gantry while I was still on my first cup of coffee that morning, so I’d barely seen him through my half-open eyes. He, Gantry and Irene had been sitting around the line green table devouring platefuls of eggs when I first got up, and they’d left before I’d even managed to shovel a few spatulas-ful onto my own plate.
Irene had still been pretty shaken up from her ‘visitor’ from the night before.
I ended up talking to her longer than I normally would have as a result, and didn’t get the modeling agency until around eleven o’clock that morning.
As for me and Nik, we didn’t talk any more about the lock-mate thing that night, or sex, for that matter...at least not directly. Even so, I woke up with him wrapped around me again, and naked, and pretty obviously not dreaming about ice cream.
I didn’t bother to mention to him that he wasn’t doing a lot for my ability to get a good night’s sleep at this point, either.
Instead, I forced myself out of bed when I found him missing from it, and crawled into the shower. Unfortunately, the hot water had been completely gone.
I was pretty sure Nik had done that, too.
He still had a bit of a ‘thing’ going with the water pressure and hot water of Seattle. Considering we mostly washed in space with a kind of sticky, acidic powder that burned off skin cells and was only ‘satisfactory’ in terms of the cleaning experience more generally, I couldn’t exactly blame him. I still hadn’t gotten over the novelty of being back in the land of hot showers, either, and had to force myself to not to get pissy when I realized he’d left me with ice cold nada for the third time that week.
Now, though, seeing him in the doorway of that back room at the agency, I found myself appraising him, even as I frowned in irritation.
I could see a few of the women behind him, talking amongst themselves, and knew Nik had been a hit with the young models, too. With his symmetrical good looks and broad shoulders, that shouldn’t have surprised me, I guess, especially since he looked like Jake had been dressing him lately, down to the designer jeans and leather jacket.
It did surprise me though, if I was being honest. And irritated me.
Without even realizing it, I’d gotten pretty weird about Nik, too.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him grumpily, ignoring the irritated, scrunchy-faced frown I caught from one of the long-blond-hair types lurking in the lobby area behind him. “Didn’t we talk about this? About the low-profile thing?”
Jessica Rabbit squeezed Nik’s arm, grinning at me. She didn’t seem to have heard a word I said, much less caught the underlying tone.
“Where do you find all of these yummy boys, Ms. Reyes?” she said. “You and your friends becoming quite the distraction here, I must say...”
Nik’s relative yumminess aside, she still batted her eyes at me as she said it.
Sighing a bit in resignation, I motioned Nik over with my head, not bothering to get up from the clean spot I’d maintained in the middle of the half-moon of files and stacks of paper that spread around me. I wasn’t about to strong-arm him out of there, and he was making it pretty clear he wasn’t going to leave me alone, either.
“Well,” I said, for Jessica Rabbit’s benefit as much as his. “If you’re going to help, then come on and help, Mr. Yummy.”
Nik quirked an eyebrow at that, but didn’t comment.
I didn’t look up again until he knelt down beside me on the patterned carpet, careful not to disturb any of the piles that sat around me in a circle. Hearing the door close behind Ms. Culare’s assistant with a soft snick, I frowned up at Nik only then.
“What are you doing here, Nik?” I said. “Can you even read English yet?”
“Not well,” he said, his face unapologetic.
“Then why are you here?”
Nik looked down at the piles of paperwork, then around at the room, including the cherry-wood conference table ringed by black, leather-padded office chairs. His eyes paused briefly on one of the modeling spreads, a blow-up of a magazine cover that took up most of the far wall by a counter with an unused coffee pot and an empty, glass water pitcher and several clean glasses. I watched him case out the entire space, and realized I’d dismissed it in a mere few seconds earlier that morning, categorizing it as ‘bland corporate conference room’ and leaving it at that.
Nik didn’t have that particular categorization in his Earth repertoire yet, apparently.
“What have you found?” he said, a few beats later, looking back at me.
Sighing again, I bent down over the laptop I’d dragged down from the table to the floor. Positioning it in my lap, I flipped it open again, showing him the screen where I’d been sharing research with Irene for the past hour or so.
“Not much,” I admitted. “But this is kind of weird...”
I twisted the screen around to show him. I’d already given him the basics on the case the day before, so he knew roughly what I’d been looking into for the past day or so.
“So I’m looking for who might have been a contact inside here, right?” I reminded him. “For those girls who are missing? Well, we ran all of the employees, and I got nothing. So then I had Irene run a scan on some of these ‘talent show’ type events that Madam Culare’s puts on, as well as the groups sponsoring them...and I traced more than half of them back to this place.”
I pointed at the screen, glancing up at Nik and frowning.
“...Irene said they buried it pretty good,” I added. “It’s probably why Culare herself didn’t notice how many requests she was getting off these guys. I’m actually beginning to think they might be using her actual talent searches to find people. That fake one with the flyer I showed you might have been some kind of side gig...one of their people branching out, trying to make extra cash by using the Culare name...”
Shrugging a little, I added,
“...I haven’t been able to find anymore shows by that group, in any case. I’m thinking the real guys found out about his scam, and were worried it would expose their real operation. Whatever the case, they seem to have shut them down...”
Nik frowned with me, staring down at the same screen.
The image was meant to make me want to party, I guess.
Or maybe, more specifically, it was supposed to make Nik and other men want to party. Or be with a bunch of girls in scanty clothing who wanted to party, too.
The website was a wash of erratic images and colors, all of them evoking the quasi-underground, ‘too-hip-to-live’ kind of vibe for rich people who were too out of the know to realize that this stuff wasn’t really hip.
Women in low-cut tops holding up martinis and fruit-laden drinks held facial expressions somewhere between a laugh and a scream where they crowded around a chrome and black leather bar. The image in the middle formed the centerpiece of a larger, more chaotic collage, where fancy appetizer plates were juxtaposed with dance floor lights covered in girls in mini-dresses and wearing five-inch heels. Another image showed a long-haired diva, obviously drunk, who was leering at the camera from her spot in the lap of a suit-wearing guy who looked at her like he’d just won the lottery.
Clearly, the club’s ads were made with the goal of enticing guys through the doors with their wallets in hand. I looked at the bright red text splashed across the top of the screen, and grimaced a little, realizing suddenly I recognized it.
Aw, hell. I’d been in that place before.
It was the same club where I’d picked up my little Ted Bundy in training, Michael Evers.
I’d gone there looking for him, on behalf of my client at the time, an ex-sorority chick turned law student that Evers had raped and strangled and left for dead in a ditch, about six months earlier. The girl, whose name was Christy McDonald, had come to me only after Evers got off at the trial, managing to produce not only a fake alibi (corroborated by, like, twenty other douche-bag witnesses), but also managed to make her look like a hysterical lunatic who had hurt herself on purpose and blamed him, all to get back at him for breaking up with her.
She told me she hadn’t known him before that day, though.
She also told me that it wasn’t the first time he’d done it. Apparently he’d bragged to her about how ‘he always got away with it,’ while he punched her repeatedly in the face.
That one, I hadn’t gotten from Gantry.
Christy came to me because I went to high school with her sister. I even vaguely remembered Christy herself, who’d been a few years older than us, but so high up on the homecoming queen food chain and social roster, I couldn’t help remembering her face.
She’d been pissed, understandably, and pretty traumatized, sure...but she hadn’t been irrational, or out for blood, per se.
Her request to me was surprisingly lucid.
She wanted Evers to get busted by the police, in a way it would stick this time, so he would be put in jail for a reasonable stretch of time. Maybe long enough for Christy herself to get a few prison psychiatrists to talk to him, and see him for what he was.
So yeah, no broken kneecaps or ominous messages whispered while Gantry stuck a gun in the guy’s mouth in his bedroom in the middle of the night. No hiring someone to castrate him, or ruin his career or even beat him up. Not much of a revenge gig at all, really...Christy came across more like a concerned citizen. And, well, a lawyer.
The thing was, after seeing his behavior on their one and only date, and Evers’ attitude during the trial, Christy was pretty sure he was a psychopath. She wanted the police to know that, too, hopefully before he went full-fledged serial killer.
I gotta tell you, I’m a sucker for cases like that.
Meaning ones that are more about preventing harm than revenge. Because I’m here to tell you, you don’t always see a lot of loyalty among women when it comes to that kind of thing.
Or not as much as you might think, anyway.
More than that, I liked Christy.
Homecoming queen or sorority girl or law school student or whatever, we had pretty much zero in common on the surface, but she had guts, and she seemed determined not to let that monster ruin her life. She must have known there was a chance Evers would still walk, even if I set him up...and that if our little sting operation could get exposed. I even warned her that if Evers caught on that he was being followed, he might be smart enough to trace me back to her, and come after her again.
She did it anyway.
Given all that, it felt like a case I couldn’t turn down.
Therefore, a few weeks after I agreed to take her money, it was in the parking lot of that same club, which had the unfortunate name of ‘Misty’s Boom-Boom Room,’ where I punched Evers in his car, not long after he’d gone caveman following my refusal to give him a blow job after I’d known him for about three minutes in that club.
Christy had warned me that he really hated it when women fought back.
Apparently, he’d told her that while he was strangling her.
He’d told the truth, it seemed. Right after I hit him, I high-tailed it out of there, but the jerk had been faster than I would have guessed, and he’d been howling and threatening me every step of the way. He nearly caught me, even before I made it to that alley Irene and I had scoped for the final showdown with the cops...and yeah, I’d been scared.
Luckily...or unluckily, depending on how you looked at it, given what happened after that...Nik had shown up in that same alley about five minutes later, while I’d been praying I could keep Evers off me long enough for the cops to show up.
“You know this place?” Nik said now, obviously picking up on some fraction of the thoughts running through my head. “You have been here before?”
“Yeah,” I said, sighing again. “And it looks like I’m going to have to go back.”
Nik insisted on coming with me, of course.
That time, I didn’t even argue.
Truthfully, even though it was the middle of the afternoon, I didn’t relish the idea of returning to Misty’s Boom-Boom Room without some pretty intense back-up. That was true even apart from the whole sex-trade angle, meaning the part about how the owners might be involved in stealing young girls who just wanted to be models––which, while yeah, a pretty lame goal, granted, shouldn’t mean they ended up being sold to rich douche bags like farm animals.
I’d also started to worry that maybe Michael Evers, aka, the wannabe Ted Bundy, had been the guy peering in at Irene while she slept the night before. I hadn’t really wanted to raise that possibility to Irene herself, but I gave Gantry a call and a head’s up, while waiting for the bus downtown and drinking tepid coffee out of Irene’s one and only travel mug.
I didn’t voice the concern to Nik directly, but he seemed to pick up on it, anyway.
Or maybe he’d just deduced the same thing as me.
In any case, he’d already told me that we would switch sleeping areas with Irene that night, and Gantry had more or less said the same thing, and that he’d have someone watching our house all day and that night, too, just to be sure.
They both seemed to think Evers was likely to make himself more of a pain in my ass, rather than less. Personally, however, I found myself thinking that was one contract I still wanted to find some way to fulfill. I knew my original client probably long ago wrote me off as dead, and I wanted to find some way to get in touch with her, too, and let her off the ethical hook for putting me in the line of fire of that jerk-off in the first place.
She’d never paid me the second half of that contract, but, as far as I was concerned, I hadn’t earned it yet, either.
Even so, I wasn’t sure how to go about tackling the Evers problem head on, right now, that is. Meaning, while I had a shape-shifting alien living in my friend’s apartment with me, and with both of us trying to lay low to keep from being picked up by the authorities. I still hadn’t gotten in touch with any of my old pals in the Seattle PD, either, for the same reason. I honestly wasn’t sure how good an idea it was to have me back on the radar of the authorities, and moreover, I didn’t want them making some kind of deal about me having been missing. I knew Gantry probably faced the same problem at this point, since most people knew he’d been looking for me for the past year or so, too, so sooner or later, I would need to come up with a halfway convincing story.
For now, though, Gantry told me to do my best to lay low. He said it would be better to do all of this once Nik had more info on what Razmun and the other morph were doing, and I wholeheartedly agreed with him.
That being said, it didn’t help me much, in terms of what to do about Evers.
It also struck me as sort of ludicrous, given my current client, who had me poking my nose into the doings of the local Russian mafia, most likely, and into an illegal trade that yeah, I despised, but that was generally heavily funded and had a lot of people on the payroll, including some in government and the police and whatever else...although no one wanted to talk about that either. I knew I really stood in danger of pissing the wrong people off right now, though, intentionally or not, which might make the whole “laying low” thing kind of a pipe dream, too, once they noticed me poking around.
Gantry agreed with me, when I brought it up with him.
I think, truthfully, he was kind of regretting he’d handed me Madam Culare’s card at all at this point, even apart from the fact that it caused me to run smack into Evers, and practically on my first day leaving the house since I got back.
So yeah, when I walked into that dank nightclub with its cheesy, colored, light-up tile dance floor and giant disco ball, my brain was pretty much spinning. I was also pretty much revved up for a fight. I tried to keep it off my expression as well as I could. I even gave Nik a lecture about staying chill, too, not being too aggressive with anyone in there, no matter what we found...but I doubt it did much good, for either of us. More than anything, I felt a lot like I was walking back into a lion’s den after I’d already been swatted a good one by that same lion.
Some people might have even said it was one of those, “wow, you never learn,” things.
They would probably be right.
The place was just as tacky and horrible and faintly reeking of ‘Girls Gone Wild’ as I remembered it.
Misty’s Boom-Boom Room was definitely one of those ‘made for guys’ kind of places. Right by the door, before I’d even left the swath of sunlight left by the hanging dark plastic Nik held apart behind me and entered the dark reaches beyond, I saw a bunch of neon pink and yellow flyers tacked to the inside wall, most of them advertising ‘free drink nights for the ladies’ and wet t-shirt contests. I also saw ‘Bring a Hot BFF’ night and ‘Jello Wrestling,’ which pretty much summed up what I remembered of the vibe from when I’d been in here the last time. The bar’s promotional nights were overtly centered on anything and everything to get as many hot, horny (and probably insecure) young girls vying for male attention into the door as possible.
The giant, padded door had a bit of an S&M vibe to it, but mostly, it evoked that whole ‘man cave’ vibe I’d gotten the last time, and that reminded me of bachelor pads from the eighties and nineties. Meaning, a lot of leather and chrome and black furniture and black sheets and black whatever else, with a number of pieces of ‘art’ that depicted nude women and/or semi-clad women in various poses.
Unfortunately, it smelled like a man cave, too...or maybe a gym locker room.
Well, a gym locker room where a lot of guys and gals had barfed up copious amounts of beer and spirits...too much, over time, to completely scrub out of the leather, wood and tile floors.
Truthfully, I really hate that stale beer smell. I have friends who love it, who associate that whole ‘bar reek’ with partying and having a good time, but I guess I’d worked the other side of those counters too many times. I more associated the smell with cleaning up after these jokers at three o’clock in the morning...usually after watching a least one bar fight over baseball or politics or a girl who didn’t like either of them, which devolved into swinging pool cues at one another’s heads or something equally stupid to make their respective points.
Then again, I’d worked bars mainly in New York.
The Seattle crowd was pretty different, or so everyone told me, but truthfully, I was skeptical. Drunken stupidity struck me as a pretty universal thing, but maybe I hadn’t spent enough time drunk in Seattle to collect enough data.
Those years in New York had been rough, anyway. That had been when our mother took off with Alejandro for a few months, and me and Jake got shipped to our father. Dear old dad, needless to say, hadn’t been all that thrilled to see us at his apartment door in Queens, although I’m sure he did his best for us, once he realized what had happened.
I was pretty sure that was when Jake startled hustling, too, probably from watching me tend bar and our father work a bank job he hated just so he could play clubs and night in the Upper West Side and Brooklyn. In some ways, I can’t say I even blame him. It’s not like women hadn’t been throwing money at Jake, even without him looking for it.
“What are we looking for, precisely?” Nik asked from next to me.
Jerking my mind back to the present, I refocused on the room, taking in the pool tables in a back alcove, a scattering of leather booths that receded into darkness, the low stage, where presumably the jello wrestling and the wet t-shirt contests took place, the dance floor with the lighting up squares of color where people stood.
It was only about two o’clock in the afternoon, but the place already had about half of its booths filled. I wondered if it was an out-and-out strip club during the day or something, and they were just between sets. The music was certainly a mixture of bad house music and seventies porn. But I knew my attitude wasn’t helping me get a good look at the place, so I tried to strip my feelings from the whole thing, get a sense of who was even here.
What was I looking for exactly? Evers?
A sign that read: To buy newly-kidnapped girls as sex slaves, talk to this guy...you’ll know him from the big Russian KGB hat and the mirrored shades...?
“What are we looking for?” Nik asked me again.
I sighed a bit, shaking my hair out of my face, and shoving my hands into the pockets of my leather jacket. “Let’s get a drink,” I told him.
“A drink.” He turned his eyes on me, and I saw they were a dark green, edging into fight territory for him. “You are thirsty, Dakota?”
I rolled my eyes at him, I couldn’t help it. “Nik, you gotta learn to either blend, or stop talking when we’re in public...okay?”
He frowned a little in puzzlement, but only nodded. “Okay,” he said.
I walked over to the bar, and slid onto one of the high stools. Nik followed after me, and did the same to my right. I found myself looking around the club as I waited for the bartender to notice us, and again assessed the clusters of people I could already see filling a number of the leather booths. One held a pair of business men in outdated suits, each of them clutching beers and one of them doing most of the talking. Guy going through a divorce, my mind interpreted, seeing the ring finger he kept touching that was absent a ring. His friend was obviously there for a good sympathy binge, which was a pretty good friend since it wasn’t even the middle of the afternoon on a weekday.
The next booth held three guys in what I would categorize as ‘newly-Western’ chic. Meaning, they probably weren’t from the US, and probably hadn’t even lived here that long, but they wanted to look like they were.
All three of them wore black designer jeans with black leather belts and tucked in black t-shirts, cheesy leather jackets with brighter slogans on them, and leather shoes that looked like Italian knock-offs with pulled up black socks. They could be Eastern European, I guessed, or maybe even German...although Germans didn’t tend to go so much for the all-black.
All three of them drank vodka, which sort of added credence to the Eastern European thing. From working bars in Queens, I happened to know the vodka-Russian-Eastern European stereotype wasn’t just a stereotype...they really did drink that stuff like water, especially the more recent immigrants. They told me that in Russia, you never saw drinks in people’s hands in bars...just people (men, usually) talking and smoking. The waitresses brought around trays covered in shot glasses periodically and they downed them and paid for them right in front of her, then went back to talking and smoking.
That image always stuck with me for some reason.
The third occupied booth I saw was filled with a bunch of guys from India...or maybe Pakistan. They also had that ‘recent immigrant’ look, but they seemed a bit less self-conscious about it for some reason. Maybe they just weren’t trying so hard to look like they were born here. Either way, they smiled a lot more and drank mostly beer. The impression I got from watching them was that they were just thrilled being in a place where they could drink and look at pictures of naked girls in the middle of the day.
The fourth booth had an actual couple in it, but my cynical mind wondered immediately if she was a working girl, when I saw the age difference between them. He looked more like a run of the mill businessman though, like one of the suits I saw at the Darth Vader building earlier that day. Glancing around at the two older guys on the other end of the bar, it struck me that the clientele was pretty different than what I remembered being in here at night.
I remembered that from working bars, too, though. Any place that was open as close to 24 hours as they could pull off had different crowds, depending on the time of day. The day crowd sometimes remained when the night crowd showed up, but they got buried under the general clamor of the people who showed up only to get drunk at night. Even among them, there were the ‘regulars,’ the ‘walk-ins’ and the non-working-hours drunks. The true daytime regulars were usually alcoholics true, with the occasional drug dealer and prostitute thrown in for good measure, as well as the walk-ins like divorce guy (situational drunk) and the strange tourist drunks from India or Yemen or wherever they were from.
My eyes got pulled off the tables when the bartender reached our end of the lacquer, chrome and leather masterpiece, and put down two cocktail napkins. He barely grunted a reply when I ordered two beers, and he set them down without telling us how much they cost. I guess people normally ran up tabs in there, or handed him credit cards, but I did neither, slapping down a twenty and hoping for the best. He gave me change, which was a relief, really.
I spent a few more minutes sipping the beer and watching the people in the various booths in the mirror behind the bar––another trick I learned in my bartending days, in that it was always a good idea to know what was going on around you without actually staring, especially in New York––when I heard a faint choking sound next to me and turned.
Nik was staring at his pint of beer, an odd expression on his face.
It struck me suddenly that maybe alcohol and the ability to shape-shift weren’t such a great combination.
“You don’t have to drink it,” I told him sympathetically. “Tastes pretty bad, eh?”
He gave me a wan smile, then followed my eyes to the mirror.
Again, I saw him take in every aspect of our surroundings carefully.
His eyes paused carefully on each specimen in the assortment of tall and squat bottles and glasses standing in neat rows directly across from us, as well as their different labels, liquid levels and colors. It struck me for the second time that day, that Nik might actually notice a great deal more than me, in terms of details––if only because he was less likely to dismiss a good percentage of those details due to previously-held biases and cultural myopia and whatever else. I started to think about how I might use that, when Nik nudged me with his arm.
“Something is happening,” he told me.
I glanced towards the spot of mirror where he was focused, and saw one of the Eastern Europeans on a cell phone. I wondered at first, what Nik meant, and then I realized two things. The guy wasn’t speaking English, but some kind of slavic language, which told me I’d been right in pegging their basic stats...and two, that he was pissed off at whoever was on the other end of the line.
I listened to him grumble and snarl at the guy for a few minutes, glancing at Nik. Again, I had to think he probably paid more attention to tone and body language than I did, too.
“You are distracting me, Dakota,” he told me quietly.
Even so, his fingers paused to caress my arm.
Which, truthfully, I found pretty distracting, too.
Even so, I found myself wondering again, what we were doing here.
I didn’t really want to approach those guys, or even ask the bartender or the manager about modeling shows or whatever, not without a better cover than, well...none. Really, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to approach them at all, even with a decent cover. I didn’t really want them to know my face, or get a name from me they might be able to trace back to, well...me.
So yeah, I was gathering impressions, sure, but I was beginning to question how useful this little field trip was. I was in over my head, I guess, and I knew it.
Maybe I needed to get Gantry in on this one, for real, that is.
Maybe I was just a big chicken, taking this case but not really committing to it.
Truthfully, not a lot scared much more than a well-financed foreign mafia that might not mind just whacking a chick who annoyed them, especially if she got to close to their favorite cookie jars. I found myself wondering what my real options were in this case, even if I did manage to trace it back to the guy running this whole scam. I could try to get the FBI involved, through Gantry or whoever, but it would just be a tip, probably, since I wasn’t too confident I could get close enough to their real operation without getting myself killed.
I glanced at Nik, about to tell him it was time to go, when someone else walked through the door from the street. They moved aside the plastic flaps separating the foyer from the main floor even as I heard the squeak of that heavy, S&M door as it started to close behind him. Even so, the man who entered moved faster than the door did, and those hanging strips let in a brief but disorienting scattering of sun-rays before falling back into place in thick, rubbery strips that blocked the light.
Seeing the face that appeared there, I felt my heart start hammering violently in my chest, hard enough that I worried it might crack a rib.
The man I stared at was pretty much the last person I expected to see here. He was also maybe the most unwelcome one I could imagine on Earth at that particular moment...even including Michael Evers, budding psychopath extraordinaire.
For it was Razmun, the leader of the rebellion of free, shape-shifting morph originating from the planet of Vilandt, who now stood surveying the same dark space that me and Nik occupied.
**
End of Segment ~ To be Continued Next Week...
