Blood Groove (20 page)

“You live
here
?” Lee Ann asked as she looked over the building. The old warehouse looked leprous in the sun, corners and edges fallen or torn away by time. Only the concrete slab of the loading dock appeared solid enough to hold weight. “It looks like the old barn my grandpa hasn’t used in twenty years.”

Before Fauvette could explain, Zginski stroked one finger lightly across Lee Ann’s forehead and she drooped forward, making the horn bleat once as her weight hit the steering wheel. Her mouth hung slack, one corner stained with mustard. Zginski pushed her back against the corner of the seat and door.

“What the hell?” Fauvette gasped, and leaned over the back of the seat to look. Lee Ann’s eyes were closed and saliva already trickled from one corner of her mouth. “Did you
kill
her?”

“Hardly,” Zginski said impatiently. “I merely put her to sleep. She will stay that way until I awaken her.”

“Christ, how can you
do
that?”

He shrugged. “It is a simple trick.” But he did not elaborate.

Outside the sounds were all organic: wind, birds, squirrels, insects, and the river in the distance. No highway traffic reached this far. A raccoon disturbed by their arrival emerged from beneath a weed-choked packing skid and waddled off into the grass, the only overt sign of life.

Zginski looked at something on the ground. “What is this?” he asked disdainfully.

The Hispanic boy’s corpse swarmed with insects in the heat, although the smell was relatively slight. Ants trailed in
and out of the hole punched into his chest. “Someone brought him here last night, I imagine,” Fauvette said.

“And you just toss them aside like empty containers?”

“Mark or Leo probably plan to dump him in the river tonight.”

“Revolting,” Zginski sneered. Then he gestured for Fauvette to precede him up the steps to the loading dock.

Fauvette led Zginski into the warehouse, but she stopped in the loading bay opening. She’d never seen the place during the day, and even its junk-filled interior became a magical sea of shapes and colors. The birds, rats, and insects looked more like fairy-tale creatures than common pests. Even the way dust floated in the shafts of sunlight, so different from the moonbeams she knew, seemed beautiful. She wanted to clap her hands in delight.

Zginski took it in slowly, with much less enjoyment. “This is your home,” he said with no inflection.

“Yes,” she said, still enraptured.

In truth he, too, had spent a month hiding in a ruined castle before learning that his true nature did not require him to share the haunts of the dead. A castle, though, even in ruins, retained its dignity and grandeur, the nobility of its original purpose. This utilitarian structure had no grace at all.

Zginski picked his way through the debris, growing more repulsed with each step. The place was filled with the rot of both meat and metal, and it appalled him that Fauvette would consider it a suitable home. The girl was certainly a bundle of contradictions: intelligent and naive, worldly and innocent. In a way, he realized, it made sense, given how she’d degenerated before he found her, that she would bury the rose of her undying beauty in this manure of her civilization. He felt a surge of smug satisfaction that he’d helped her bloom anew, and that she might yet prove worthy of the effort.

Then he found the hobo’s corpse, source of the vilest of the
many stenches, and his optimism soured. This was intolerable; only the basest creatures lived in their own filth, and apparently Fauvette’s friends were on a par with dung beetles. He looked back at her. She stared up at the sun coming through cracks in the tin roof, amazement in her eyes.

Then something moved in the corner of his vision. He whirled toward it.

Danielle rose on her elbows and stared up at him with blank, feral terror. “Please,” she whimpered, her voice ragged with thirst. “Help me. I’m a cop, I’m from the city, I’ve been attacked . . .” The “cop” bit was a stretch, but Danielle was in no mood to explain her real job description. She was convinced at first that she’d dreamed the sound of the car’s engine outside, and now the reality of rescue brought tears to her eyes. Whoever this pale, handsome stranger was, he and his daughter had arrived just in time.

Zginski stared back, deciphering the story from the wounds visible on her body. She was another plaything from the previous night, not finished off like the boy outside but too weak to escape.

He turned to Fauvette, who had joined him. “What is a ‘cop’?” he asked softly.

“A policeman.”

“You allow women to be police officers?”

She shrugged. “Some are.”

He pondered for a moment. “This is unfortunate.”

“Why?” Fauvette asked. The naked woman now stared at her, relief fading to uncertainty as neither she nor Zginski made a move to help.

“The peasant boy outside is one thing, but a police officer, especially a woman, will be missed,” Zginski explained. “If she is found dead, the effort to identify her killers will bring more scrutiny than we wish.”

“What do we do with her, then?” Fauvette asked.

He knelt and looked into Danielle’s face. “Tell me the full
truth,” he said to her, and she shivered. “How did you come to be here?”

For a moment she successfully resisted the overwhelming urge to do as he said. Then she answered, “I’m not really a cop, I’m a doctor. I’m an assistant coroner for Shelby County. A boy was found dead of causes I couldn’t identify, and I was trying to find out if there was a new drug being used by the local teens.”

“Toddy,” Fauvette said.

“And who brought you here?” Zginski asked.

“A tall white boy, and two black kids.”

“My friends,” Fauvette said.

Danielle looked at the girl, a fresh jolt of fear going through her. How had she not noticed the girl’s pallor, and the sharpened canines when she spoke? “Oh, God, you’re with them, you’re
one
of them . . .”

Zginski touched a distinctive red smear at the corner of her lip. “Is this your own blood?”

Danielle suddenly flashed back to the pressure of the black boy’s cold lips on hers. “Hey, taste your own ass blood, white girl!” he had said, and pushed the fluid into her mouth with his thick tongue. She snarled and bit at it, and he jumped back, wincing at the sensation. “Wow, this one bites back!” he said with a laugh as she vomited.

Danielle tried to answer, but was too scared to speak. Zginski stroked her across her forehead, causing her to collapse like Lee Ann. Fauvette shook her head. “You’ve
got
to show me how to do that.”

He ignored her and looked around. “There are her clothes,” he said. “They appear undamaged. We shall dress her, and send Lee Ann to take her home.”

“Just like that?”

“Yes, just like that. Lee Ann will obey any instruction we give her now; she is fully under our power. And I can control this woman well enough to get her home, where her tales of
vampires will no doubt inspire the same ridicule as they did in
Blacula
.”

“But she saw us. She knows where the warehouse is.”

“It is of no concern. If she is smart, she will count herself lucky that she survived this experience at all.”

Fauvette looked down at the woman. Even in her forced sleep she looked terrified, not lucky at all.

   On the radio later that day, Memphis’s own Al Green pleaded with his girlfriend to stay together. Seated in Lee Ann’s car outside Danielle’s apartment building, the two women felt the irony of that sentiment. Despite their mutual wish to be far away from each other, they resolutely, impotently stayed together.

The engine idled and the windows were rolled halfway down, so in the afternoon heat the vehicle was an oven. Flies and sweat bees buzzed inside, attracted by the salt on the women’s skin. Neither woman made any move to shoo them away, instead gazing silently straight ahead. A UPS deliveryman looked askance at them as he left a package outside the building’s entrance but made no comment. Other than him they saw no one.

For Lee Ann, it was a matter of exhaustion. She was simply too tired to move, no matter Zginski’s wishes. His orders were the only things keeping her conscious, but even the compulsion to obey them couldn’t get her going. She needed food, and sleep, but could acquire neither while the other woman sat in her car.
Take her home
, he had said,
make sure she gets inside, then wait for me at the motel
. But the bitch just wouldn’t leave.

It was different for Danielle. She
wanted
to fling open the door and run away screaming, but her body would not respond. The last thing the long-haired man had told her was
to obey the other woman, and until Lee Ann ordered her to go, she could literally do nothing. Worse, her injuries made sitting agony, and the sweat from the hot car only added to the pain.

She couldn’t believe no one stopped to ask if they needed help. The parking lot was almost empty; her neighbors, all professional people, were still at work, and since the building did not take couples with children, there were no house-wives home to notice her. Even the deliveryman, faced with two attractive women sitting in a car on the hottest day of the year so far, had not said a word. Perhaps he thought they were on drugs.

Finally Lee Ann cleared her throat and said in a monotone, without looking, “Hey.”

“Yes?” Danielle answered, eyes still fixed straight ahead. Her voice was ragged from both screaming the night before and the recent enforced silence.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Yes.”

Lee Ann took a long, deep breath. Speaking took every bit of strength she had left. “Why are you still
here
?”

“I think you have to tell me to go,” Danielle said.

“What? That’s
it
? Then go.”

With a burst of energy, Danielle threw open the car door and ran up the stairs to the building entrance. She burst through the breezeway and up the steps, sobbing at the pain in her legs and rear. No one appeared from any of the other apartments to offer aid, and at last she reached her door.

Then she remembered her apartment keys were still locked in her car downtown.

This final defeat was too much, and with a whine of submission she slid to the floor, huddled against her door, and cried quietly until she passed out.

Outside, Lee Ann tried to put the car in gear so she could
return to the motel and sleep, but her fingers lacked the strength. Her task completed, she passed out slumped over the wheel, and slowly slid off until she fell across the front bench seat, half on the floorboard. Within moments she was snoring in harmony with the car’s idling motor.

T
HE SUMMER NIGHT
took forever to arrive, but eventually the sun dipped below the trees, then the horizon. Stars appeared in the east as the day’s glow faded. Fireflies sparkled in the tall grass.

Olive emerged first, slinking out of the shadows, humming to herself. She was dressed in a bright green tube top and jeans low on her hips, with a wide green belt.

“Hey, Olive,” Fauvette said. She leaned against the warehouse wall beneath one of the windows.

Olive did a double take. “
Wow
. Chile, I forgot how nice you clean up. What size are those Levi’s?”

“Where’s Mark?”

“I dunno. Guess he’s not up yet. He’ll be late for work, and he hates that.” Then she looked around. “Hey, where’s the white girl we left out here?”

Fauvette ignored the question. “What about Leo?”

Leonardo dropped from the ceiling next to Olive. “Right here, you fine ladies.” He grinned when he saw her. “Damn, Fauvette, you look like a vanilla shake with
all
the sprinkles.” Then he looked around. “Hey, where’s our mayonnaise princess from last night? She was like Thanksgiving
turkey, you just knew the leftovers would be better the second day.”

“I have dealt with the young woman,” Zginski said as he sauntered from the loading dock, hands casually in his pockets. He knew how to make an entrance, Fauvette thought; he stopped just short of the moonlight that would’ve shown his face. “She was a police officer, and if luck is with us, she will keep all this embarrassing nonsense to herself and your animalistic actions will have no further consequences.”

Leonardo frowned at Zginski’s superior attitude and shifted to a belligerent, cocky stance, his chest thrust out. “And who the hell is
this
honky mofo, calling me an ‘animal’?”

“He’s with me,” Fauvette said quickly.

“I am Rudolfo Zginski.”

“You about to be Rudolfo the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” Leonardo said, and threw a punch that could’ve knocked down a tree. Zginski calmly blocked it with his forearm and struck back with a quick, effective jab to the neck. He swept Leonardo’s legs out from under him with one foot and dropped atop him, a knee on the boy’s sternum, an index finger jabbed straight down against his chest. A little more effort would send it straight through his heart.

“You will crumble to dust, or whatever your kind becomes, if you provoke me again,” Zginski snarled.