Then she went limp.
He grabbed a big handful of her pretty night-black hair and pulled it back like horse reins.
A dull whap! resounded behind him.
Blackjack glanced up in a kind of mindless, sudden awareness. But he didn’t know exactly what he was aware of here.
What the goddamn hell happ—
Then a blossom of pain exploded at the base of his skull.
— | — | —
Nineteen
Sallee’s was rocking. Heavy metal power chords from the jukebox shook the walls. Strobe lights flashed and hammered the stage in multicolored pandemonium. As rowdy patrons barked for more beer, waitresses hustled between the aisles like gymnasts on high wires.
The crowd was in an uproar.
Christ, Phil thought.
It was Vicki.
She danced through her set with an unmitigated prowess, each step of her high heels in perfect synchronicity with the pounding music. Green eyes scanned the crowd like highly faceted emeralds; her carmine g-string glittered. It was clear—Vicki owned the stage, as well as the crowd, whenever she danced. This was her domain, totally. It must be an odd feeling of power for a woman, through her mere sexual presence, to command the attention of everyone in her midst. But it also must be pretty depressing, Phil considered. When she was up there, naked save for spikes and a g-string, she was an icon of flesh. Not really even a human being anymore, but an entity stripped down to its sexual bones.
Phil tried not to stare.
Her red hair spun to a blur. The strobes seemed to highlight her body in split-second fragments which flashed, then disappeared, all within the pulsing, sonic scape of the music. The crowd howled in frenzy at each step, each move, each sweep of a leg and toss of a shoulder. Glitter and sweat sparkled in the cleft of her bosom…
Phil couldn’t help but let his contemplations crumble. He knew he didn’t love her anymore, yet still, it was not an easy thing to watch one’s ex-fiancee dance topless in a strip joint. The crowd’s predatory revel rose like waves, while Phil’s spirit plummeted. That black voice returned, to ask the question he couldn’t stand to face:
How many guys is she gonna fuck tonight, Phil? Two, three? Five, maybe? Maybe more, huh? A bod and a set of tits like that, shit, I’ll bet she bags a bundle off these redneck slimebags. But cheer up, buddy. At least you got to fuck her for free…
Phil felt even worse when he took a closer look; something glittered more fiercely on her bare chest. Aw, Christ, he thought when he realized what it was.
A tiny diamond on a sheer gold chain.
A Valentine’s Day gift he’d given her over a decade ago.
“Another beer, pal?” asked the odd barkeep.
“Yeah, why not?” Phil replied.
“You look like someone shot your dog.”
“Well,” Phil said, “actually I’m pretty bummed that there’s no wrestling on tonight.”
“Grappling,” the keep corrected. “It was on earlier. Nature Boy Ric Flair knocked Sting’s lights out. It was glorious.”
“Damn, I miss out on everything,” Phil said.
Then the ever-familiar slap impacted his back; Eagle Peters stood up to the rail, his long blond hair swaying. “What’s up, man?”
“Just hanging out.”
Eagle cast a quick gaze to Vicki onstage. “Yeah,” he replied rather darkly, then wisely saw fit to change subjects. “Hey, you feel like going in the back room?”
Phil looked up with a wince. “I thought you hated the back room?”
“I do, but I gotta talk to someone.” Eagle paused. “Gotta talk a little business.”
A little business, huh? Phil thought. It seemed another great opportunity had just landed in his lap. “I’m always game for the back room,” he said, remembering his cover. “Let’s go.”
“And another thing.” Eagle lowered his voice. “You interested in a little sideline work? We gotta little run to make tonight, but we need a driver.”
“What are you running?” Phil asked.
“Just don’t worry about that. It ain’t risky. We can lay a couple hundred on you for an hour’s work. You interested or not?”
Was Eagle testing him? Phil didn’t know. But what he did know was that Eagle had an arrest record for running PCP, and he’d just asked Phil to be his driver. This was every undercover cop’s dream…
“Like I said, man, let’s go.”
Just play it cool, Phil, he told himself.
They got up and wended their way to the entry. Druck, the Creeker doorman, gave them both a hard look, then nodded that they could pass. Inside seemed even darker than last night, and quieter. A deformed dancer moved slowly up on the stage in a veil of blood-red light and droning music. Thank God it was dark in here; Phil didn’t care to see the details. All he could tell was that her head seemed bulbed in three humps…
Eagle whispered something to a cryptic waitress with large breasts and one foreshortened arm. Then she seated them in a back booth.
At once, another figure joined them.
“This here’s Paul Sullivan,” Eagle introduced. “My pal, Phil Straker. Don’t worry, he’s cool. Says he wants to drive for us tonight.”
Alarms were already ringing in Phil’s head at the name. Paul Sullivan. That’s the guy with the rap sheet for dust, the guy who filed the missing person report. “Hey, Paul, good to meet ya,” he said and offered to shake the guy’s hand.
The guy didn’t shake.
Paul Sullivan had a face like a beaten anvil, a beady-eyed, unpleasant wedge. Shortish dark hair and a toughened build. “I don’t know, man,” Sullivan complained to Eagle. “I ain’t never seen this guy before.”
“Relax,” Eagle assured. “I told you, he’s cool; I known him for years. You said we needed a new man since Kevin blew town.”
Sullivan shrugged. “Awright, I guess we can try him out. So long as he don’t ask no questions.”
“Hey, man, you want me to drive, I’ll drive.”
Sullivan sort of smirked, then began trading whispers with Eagle. Phil couldn’t make out much of what they were saying, but he figured it best to try to pick things up a step at a time. Instead he pretended to watch the stage. The Creeker girl with the cloven head had lain down on her back, her legs rising in a sleek V. Her bare feet, with but three toes on each, roved slowly in the dark-scarlet light.
Earlier Phil had read a little bit about inbred physiology in the books he’d gotten at the county library. The phenomena proved much more intricate than he’d thought.
The more intensive the inbreeding, the more damage to the reproductive genes, and the higher the rate of defective births. Scarlet eyes and black hair were common traits, and so were enlarged heads, missing or extra fingers and toes, and uneven limbs. But Phil quickly assumed that these Creekers were extraordinarily inbred, bad genes passing down not for years but for whole generations, because a lot of the deformities he’d seen were gross extensions of those detailed in the books. One of the books had pictures, and they weren’t nearly as severe as the Creekers here.
Phil looked closer at the dancer’s head. It seemed split by a hard fissure of flesh. But—
What’s she doing now?
The dancer remained flat on her back with her legs raised.
Then her hips seemed to…shake.
