There was a small stage to the right of the bar, but it was currently dark. All the action was taking place on the main stage, which was straight ahead and surrounded by small tables. As far as strip bar stages went, it wasn’t anything special. It had a pole in the middle, was lit by multicolored strobe lights, and was surrounded by a brass rail and chairs. Only a few of those chairs were occupied, but that was about to change. A busty, strawberry blonde, currently strutting toward the pole, was peeling off her bikini top and swinging it over her head to the beat of an old hip hop song.
“I take it you don’t go to places like this very often?” Cole asked.
Paige kept walking toward the tables at the right side of the stage and had to shout to be heard over the thumping bass. “What?”
Now it was Cole’s turn to shout. “Have you ever been here before?”
“Not this place, but the last time I met Prophet, it was in a shithole outside of Kansas City. This is actually a lot better.”
“Really?”
She nodded. “I would have been hassled three times by now in that dive. This place is nice.” As she said that, Paige returned the friendly nod she got from an approaching waitress.
“Hi guys,” the waitress said. “Sit anywhere you like. Can I get you a drink?”
Paige handed over her ticket. “Jack and Coke.”
“What about you, sweetie?” the waitress asked Cole.
“I’ll just have a Coke.”
She took his ticket and walked toward the bar. Even though she obviously had a nice little body, she wasn’t dressed like she might be dancing that night. When Cole looked back to Paige, she leaned toward him and said something that was swallowed up by the bass of the music and the hoots of the men near the stage.
“What did you say?” he shouted.
“Your drink,” she clarified. “I called you a pussy.”
Despite the fact that he should have been at least slightly offended, he couldn’t help but grin. There was just something about hearing Paige say that particular word in those particular surroundings that made him feel warm inside. Very juvenile, but very, very true.
“So where’s this Prophet guy?” he asked.
“Just look for the buffet.”
He wasn’t sure where a strip club might set up its buffet, and he sure didn’t mind having a look around. Dancers in all shades of hotness strutted from one table to another, bending down to stroke the customers’ hands and ask for a private dance. The dancer on stage was down to a few bandannas wrapped around her waist and nothing else. Another woman stood at the edge of the stage waiting for the next song to start. And there, like a toad sitting in the middle of a flower bed, was the buffet.
As far as food services went, it wasn’t much. There looked to be less than five items in all, and none of them seemed to have been touched. Cole amended that last observation when he spotted a man at a table next to the short bed of hot plates, hunched down over at least three dishes piled high with food. He couldn’t quite make out the man’s face, but pointed him out to Paige anyway and asked, “Is that him?”
She took her eyes from the stage and looked in the direction he was pointing. “Yep. That’s him.”
“Were you watching the dancers?”
“Come on,” she said quickly. “Time for business.”
“There’s an ATM by the door, just in case you’d like—”
Shaking her head, Paige swung one arm back and effortlessly snapped her hand against a spot in Cole’s midsection that robbed him of his next breath. By the time she made it to the table with the buffet’s only fan, she was smiling warmly. “Hello, Prophet,” she said. “Catch any food poisoning yet?”
The guy at the table was about a hundred pounds lighter than Cole would have expected for someone with so much food piled in front of him. A black man with short, clipped hair, he was dressed in old jeans and a dark, hooded sweatshirt. One leg was stretched out from under the table to stick a work boot a little too far into the common walkway. Cole narrowed the man’s age to anywhere in the late thirties to early forties range, but the black light hanging nearby made that a difficult call to make. A narrow face and hooked nose all pointed down to a fairly well-trimmed beard.
“I’ve got business here this time around, Paige,” the hungry man said. “I told you about the nymph I was tracking.”
“Nympho?” Cole asked anxiously. “Point her out.”
“No,” Paige shouted over the music. “Nymph. Prophet always comes up with some stupid excuse to meet me at places like these. This time he’s tracking woodland creatures.”
“This one doesn’t live in the woods, obviously,” Prophet added. “Who’s this you brought with you?” Sharp eyes sized Cole up in the amount of time it took for him to lift a callused hand. As far as Cole could tell, there were no scars on the man’s palms.
As Cole shook the man’s hand, Paige announced, “Cole Warnecki, this is Walter Nash.”
Doing his best not to match the other man’s iron grip, Cole said, “I’ve heard you also go by Prophet.”
“The MEG guys came up with the name, but I don’t know you well enough for you to call me that.”
Cole raised his eyebrows and asked, “You’re a psychic?”
“If you’re expecting a prediction after this handshake, you’re in for a real disappointment.”
“Just tell me one thing.”
“What?” Walter asked warily.
Cole glanced down at the plates, which he could now see were covered with mashed potatoes and some sort of goulash. “That food any good?”
Slowly, Walter’s beard widened as the mouth beneath it formed a vaguely demonic grin. “Yeah, it’s all right. All you can eat. Nobody ever tries the food in these places, but I figure it’s gotta just be catered from somewhere so it should be fine.”
“And here I thought men were drooling over the dancers,” Paige grumbled as she sat down.
“Dancers are over there. Food’s over here,” Walter said. “No reason I can’t have both.”
Cole took a seat next to Walter and turned his chair so he could stay in the conversation while also watching the stage. Since one song was fading into another, the strawberry blonde was at the farthest end of the stage and reaching down to help the next dancer up. The new arrival was tall, dressed in an outfit made of purple silk scarves, and had long, coal-black hair.
“What’ve you got for us, Prophet?” Paige asked.
After setting down his fork, Walter reached into the large pocket sewn on the front of his sweatshirt to retrieve a small spiral notebook. He flipped the notebook open and studied the scribbles written there. “It’s a place due west of a town called Milton, which is near Clear Lake. One of the MEG guys called me, since neither of you could pull yourself away from Chicago.”
“Did I tell you how much I appreciate you taking up some of the slack now that Gerald and Brad are gone?” Paige asked in a sweet voice that Cole wasn’t sure he’d heard before.
Walter ate it up with a smile and said, “Not until right now, but it’s no problem. Anyway, the MEG guy’s name is…Jarvis. He took me out to some creepy old house that had a pit in the back of it.”
“Did you say a pit?” Cole asked.
“Yes I did, and I checked it myself. It could’ve been a basement or cellar at one time, but it’s a pit now. He says he saw some messed-up-looking animals in there, but they weren’t there when I was.”
“You went to have a look inside?” Paige asked.
Nodding, Walter flipped the page of his notebook and angled his head as if he was squinting through a pair of bifocals. “It’s a Half Breed den.”
The smile that had been on Paige’s face disappeared. “You’re sure?”
“I may not hunt the damn things, but I’ve tracked down plenty for you guys over the years. There were Half Breeds living there. I could smell ’em. The pit looked big enough for three to five of them, but I wasn’t about to crawl around to count the droppings for myself.”
Paige nodded.
“Since Half Breeds like to run out in the open, I took a drive around that area,” Walter continued. “There’s a spot about five miles from the den that’s got ‘werewolf hunting ground’ written all over it. It’s some lake called Osh
