Incubus Dreams

46

The Sapphire Club is a low, wide building and doesn’t look that nice from the outside. It doesn’t look that different from many of the rest of the bars and clubs in the area, so why is it a gentlemen’s club and the others are just titty bars? Security, decor, and a dress code for the dancers, for starters. Tonight the VIP parking area was so full of official and semiofficial vehicles that you could barely see the front of the club through the flashing lights and milling people. There was even a big fire truck and a rescue truck alongside the regular ambulance. I had no idea why we needed the big truck, but murder scenes always attract more people than you really need, more cops, and more civvies, more everything.

There was a crowd pressed against the police tape and sawhorse barriers. Some of the women looked barely dressed for the October cold, so it had to be people from the nearby clubs. Most of the dancers arrived at work in street clothes then changed there. So at least some of the women shivering in the cold had left work elsewhere to join the gawkers.

I actually had to park in the lot of the nearest club, the Jazz Baby, live music, and live entertainment. What could be better? Sleep, maybe. It was nearly four in the morning. My shower had beaten the record for speed, but it was still quite a drive from the Riverfront.

We’d managed to get blood on the front of my shirt, so I was wearing a T-shirt that Jean-Claude had found for me somewhere. It was white, so the black bra showed through, or would have if I hadn’t been wearing Byron’s leather jacket again. Maybe I could just keep the jacket on.

No, it’d be warm inside. Oh, well. If the worst thing that happened tonight was that someone noticed I was wearing a black bra under a white shirt, we’d count ourselves lucky.

Jean-Claude had also found underwear, again it was thong, but it was actually comfortable, because it was made of soft T-shirt material, even the bit that went between your cheeks. Most of the girl thongs I’d looked at had had elastic or lace ru

I had to flash the badge just to get through the crowd. When I got up to the line, the officer closest to me didn’t really look at me. He saw a woman in boots and a short skirt and a leather jacket and said, “Club’s closed for the night, you won’t be working.”

I shoved my badge into his face, and he had to back up to focus on it. “Actually, Officer,” and I read his name tag in the bright lights, “Douglas, I think I will be working tonight.”

He looked down at me, because he was taller than me. I watched his face try to wrap around the look of me and the badge in one package.

He wasn’t the first police officer to have a problem putting it all together, and he wouldn’t be the last. I might think like a cop, but I don’t really look like one. Especially not tonight.

“I’m Marshal Anita Blake, Sergeant Zerbrowski called me.” Always good to remind people that I hadn’t invited myself into their party. I had the authority to do it, but I tried to do as little uninvited butting in as I could. No cop, no matter what the flavor, likes someone horning in on their case. Especially not a big one.

Officer Douglas stared at my badge like he didn’t believe it was real. “No one told me that the feds were coming.”

“Ya know, it’s four in the morning. I asked your permission to cross this line as a courtesy, but this badge is a federal badge and it gives me the right to cross this line, enter this crime scene, and do my fucking job. If you stop me, Officer Douglas, I will charge you with obstructing a federal officer in the performance of her duty.”

He looked like he’d swallowed something sour, but he waved another officer over. He had him take his place at the barrier and held the tape for me. “I’ll walk you through, ma’am.”

I guess I couldn’t blame him. I mean what if the badge wasn’t real, or wasn’t mine? Of course, if I’d been a big, strapping guy, he wouldn’t have had a problem with it. You can always tell a new cop from a veteran. New ones still judge a lot on appearance, once you’ve been on the cop for a few years, you stop doing that. Because by then you’ve learned that what’s on the outside doesn’t tell you that much about what’s on the inside. A cute little old lady can pull a trigger just as well as a big scary looking guy. Rookies don’t know that yet.

They haven’t learned the lesson that you can’t tell by looking.

Officer Douglas didn’t shorten his stride for me, and he didn’t need to. I was used to walking scenes with Dolph, who made Douglas look petite. I kept up with him even in the high-heeled boots. He looked like he wanted to say something, but he didn’t. Probably just as well.

Some of the police on this side of the river don’t know me on sight. They thought what Douglas had thought, that I worked here, because they catcalled after us, “Hey, Dougie, going to get a piece.

No lap dances on company time, Douglas.” And worse. I ignored it all.

It was four in the morning, and I hadn’t been to bed yet, I didn’t care. Besides, I’d learned the hard way that the more attention you pay to shit like that, the more you have to shovel. Ignore it, and it usually goes away, because it just isn’t any fun if they don’t get a rise out of you. Besides, they were teasing Douglas more than me. I was just the nameless girl who gave them an excuse.

He ignored it, but his face was blazing by the time we got to the main doors. He actually held the door for me, and I let him. There’d been a point in my life when I would not have let him hold the door.

But with his face already burning with embarrassment, I wasn’t going to arm wrestle him for the door. I might have to work with him again, so screw it, he could hold the door. Besides, if I put him on the spot about the door, it would have given his coworkers more to tease him about, and I didn’t want that.

We went through the glass doors into a little entry area that reminded me of the front of a nice restaurant, complete with a little desk and a maоtre d’. Though that probably wasn’t the tall guy’s official title. But hey, he was wearing a white suit jacket with a tie, he did look like a maоtre d’. When I’d seen him last, he was tall and self-assured and had taken my name and Asher’s and called on a phone to have a “hostess” escort us in. Now he leaned on his counter, head in his hands, looking ill.

There were bathrooms off to the left, and a short hallway that led into the club. From the door you really couldn’t see into the club. It gave them a last chance to keep out the undesirables, or the underagers, before someone saw breasts. The color scheme was muted blues and purples, and if they hadn’t had silhouettes of naked women on the walls, it would have looked like a restaurant, oh, and the poster advertising that Wednesday was amateur night.

I couldn’t remember the big guy’s name, just couldn’t remember it.

But it didn’t matter, because Douglas took me past him without a word.

Up the little ramp, and the club spilled out around us. There was a good solid bar area to the left that would have done any club proud, but the rest of the room was all strip club. I mean, what else do you use little round stages for? The room was mostly blues and purples, and maybe other colors. I couldn’t tell for sure, because most of the big room was lit by black light, or other odd lighting, so that the room was lit, but it was still terribly dark. I’d been surprised the first time I was here, it was as if light could be dark, so that though there was no actual shadowed area, the whole room seemed like it was in a shadow.

It was a weekend night, the place was packed, but quiet. They’d had to turn off the music, and the DJ’s endless prattle was mercifully absent. In fact, the room seemed wrong this quiet, as if the noise was part of the decor. There were men, and more women than you’d think in the audience, huddled now all together like mourners at an unexpected funeral. The dancers were all in one corner with a plainclothes detective that I didn’t recognize. A big man in a uniform that matched Officer Douglas’s strode toward us, with a notebook in one hand and a pen in the other. He still had his hat on, as if his round face would have been incomplete without it.

“Douglas, what the fuck are you bringing me another stripper for?

We got all the girls that were in the club tonight over there.” He motioned with his thumb over his shoulder. He had small, beady eyes, or maybe I was just tired of being called a stripper, and discounted like I didn’t matter, just because I happened to be a girl and not in uniform. “Unless, you saw somethin’ outside. Did you, girlie, see anything?”

I raised my badge so he could see it, and stepped around Douglas so I was facing what had to be his boss. “Federal Marshal Anita Blake, and you are?”

I could see his face darken even in the odd lighting. “Sheriff Christopher, Melvin Christopher.” He looked me up and down, not the way a man will if he thinks a woman is pretty, but like he was sizing me up, and wasn’t impressed. “You know, if you don’t want people thinking you’re a stripper, you should dress better, miss.”

“That’s Marshal Blake to you, Sheriff, and in the big city, this is called date clothes. Dresses down to your knees went out of style a few decades back.”

His face got a little darker, his eyes went from unfriendly to hostile. “You think you’re fu

“No,” I said, and I took a deep breath in and let it out slow.

“Look, you stop calling me a stripper, and I’ll stop making cute remarks at you. Let’s both pretend we’re here to solve a crime, and just do our jobs.”

“We don’t need federal help here.”

I sighed. I looked around the room and didn’t see anyone I knew.

“Fine, you want to do it this way, we can do it this way. If you prevent me from questioning all the vampires before dawn comes, I will charge you with obstructing a federal officer in the performance of her duties.”

“Some of them your friends, that it? I heard you were coffin bait.”

I shook my head and walked wide around Douglas, which put me out of reach for the sheriff.

“Where the hell are you going?”

“To question the witnesses,” I said, and I kept a little bit of an eye on the sheriff, because I wasn’t sure what he would do.

“How do you know where they are?”

“They aren’t out here, or out in the parking lot, so they’ve got to be in the Sapphire Room.” I was almost to the little raised platform in front of a pair of nice wooden doors. There was another uniformed officer in front of the doors. I had been in there before, so I knew the sound was muffled inside the room. That’s why I hadn’t yelled for Zerbrowski already.