Dancing with Werewolves

Chapter Thirty-Two

Ric called me as soon as he got back the next day. "Man, what a mess."

"Where were you?"

"I could use a night at Los Lobos. You ready to rock 'n' roll?"

Hearing the soul-deep weariness in his voice, I decided that mentioning my petty personal problems was minor. I could have pointed out that the exertion of dancing wasn’t the best medicine for a burned-out traveler, but I was too selfish.

"Salsa," I corrected, "but it's not the full moon quite yet."

"We'll make it so."

"Yes, sir, Captain Picard."

"Where are the hot-mama low-rider jeans?" Ric asked when he picked me up outside Hector's estate. I respected his decision not to confront Quicksilver on his own turf yet.

I fluffed my turquoise silk skirt in the car. "I felt festive."

My fluffing gesture had made my silver bracelet jingle jangle like spurs.

"Nice bracelet. Navaho work, isn't it?"

"Um-" I glanced down to find that the bauble had gone Native American and added turquoise stones to match my dancing skirt. "Yeah, I guess."

"You didn't know when you bought it?"

"I found lots of old silver jewelry at estate sales in Kansas."

I told myself that I hadn't-actually lied to Ric; I just hadn't hit him in the face with Snow's nasty little permanent present. Still, I felt queasy about dodging the truth with him, and changed the subject pronto.

"The turquoise doesn’t quite match the rhinestones on my shoes."

He eyed and recognized the vintage plastic heels from our last, and first, date. "Those your lucky dancing shoes, chica? Or mine?"

That was another subject I didn't want to delve into, what could happen between us tonight. Haskell's ugly innuendos had tainted the growing ease of my relationship with Ric.

"So what happened where you were?" I asked. "Or can't I know?"

" Juarez."

I eyed his taut-jawed profile against the passing headlights, wondering if Captain Malloy had ever had this view.

"Oh. The thousands of factory girl murders that have been going on for decades. It must have been awful." I could say that with feeling, having been haunted recently by my own youthful innocent, Jeanie with the light brown hair.

His lips tightened, if that was possible. "I've been on it since I joined the FBI, fresh out of Quantico a few years ago. That's when they started calling me the Cadaver Kid. Sometimes I find the fresh dead. You would swear life had just kissed their cheeks goodbye. There's something…sweet about that. It's good to settle their families' anxieties and get police evidence, but many of them don't make it from the coroner's facility to a funeral home."

"Why not?"

"Hijacked," he said tersely. "Their bodies have hardly deteriorated. If they're raised as zombies, they have most of their faculties and such fresh, young corpses are in high demand as CinSim material."

"Ghastly! Can't anyone stop it?"

"Nobody's stopped Juarez," he said. "It often suits the powerful to use tragedies to enrich themselves."

After a moment he spoke again. "Sometimes I find the long-dead. They are only dry bones, fragile as precious parchment. I feel like an archeologist, privileged to reveal them. Then there are the savagely murdered ones. They still fester in the earth like plague victims. Bruised, bleeding. All those young, helpless girls. It was like being clawed at by…"

Groupies? I almost said. "Why were you there? Isn't it dangerous?"

"Damn right. The drug lords and traffickers in human and unhuman labor run the city with huge gangs. Police chiefs don't last twenty-four hours before being gunned down, and U.S. border forces and drug and immigration agents are often assassinated or caught, tortured, and killed within a day of entering the city."

"Ric!"

"That's why they want me there. I can blend in better than an Anglo agent and there's always my sterling track record at finding corpses. This time I found a DEA agent they'd done a torture voodoo act on. The body had to be brought up in pieces. At least the CinSim runners won't get him."

"Oh, my God! I'm glad I didn't know where you were and what you were doing. It's a wonder you don't have post-traumatic shock syndrome."

Ric shook his head as if dislodging memories of carnage.

"I need to be there. A lot of bodies have needed finding over the years. Some serial killers are working there, and the usual gangs of smugglers, thieves, and rapists. Nobody really cares about the deaths of these young women except their families. The Anglos who run the border factories like the cheap labor and provide buses that are about as secure as a sieve. The workers often have to stay overtime and miss the bus schedule. Their long hours send them home on foot after dark and Mexican culture doesn’t give much respect to women out after dark. They're picked off by the border predators so fast that a girl can be seen leaving the factory one night and sleep in a shallow grave by the next morning."

"All human predators?"

"No." He was silent for a while. "Vampires and werewolves too. And then there's the regional boogeyman, the chupacabra."

"Chupacabra?"

"A blood-sucking goat-killer. It's been described as everything from a small half-alien, half-dinosaur tailless vampire with quills running down its back to a pantherlike creature with a long snaky tongue to a hopping animal that leaves a trail of sulfuric stench. Some claim they're alien 'pets' or cloning experiments gone wrong. The UFO nuts call such creatures Anomalous Biological Entities, aka ABEs."

I had a shuddersome memory of the trio of dead cows near Wichita. That half-dinosaur tail reminded me of the huge reptilian track I'd found there.

"Have you ever seen such a thing out on the desert?" I asked.

He paused for a minute or more. "Maybe. I've seen a lot of bizarre things out in the desert. Chupacabras? Rogue humans and unhumans are scarier, and human predators are worst of all, because they have no need to kill to live."

"You found more victims this trip?" Personally, I meant. These weren't numbers, statistics; these were lost bodies and souls he dowsed for.

"Twelve, some as young as fourteen. The oldest was twenty-two. They'll be identified and catalogued and buried again in the desert, with only a crude headstone. It's beginning to feel sadistic to dig them up, but the authorities keep hoping each new death will nail some single maniac killer who can die for the sins of all the opportunistic rapists who fill the border cities."

We were out of the city now and driving on the dark, almost deserted highway toward the distant faint twinkles of mountain habitations. We were silent for a while, lulled by the empty dark and the roar of the Vette's engine.

"It must…take something out of you to find all these bodies," I said finally.

"It always has." His glance slid toward me and darted back to the empty highway.

He was trying to decide whether to tell me something. Usually I wanted to know everything. Relentless reporter, that's me. Nothing I can't take. No knowledge too devastating. Now I didn't know about taking on whatever Ric was holding back. I sensed still-raw wounds underneath that smooth, defensive exterior. I didn't know if I was one of them. Or could be.

He decided to let me in a little more. "I've always maintained a certain control, a certain distance, when I work. Ric Montoya, human cadaver dog. Ever since… Sunset Park, I don't have that distance. I don't just find them and deal with the dead. I feel them now. They expect something of me I've never had to give, like they're reaching out of the earth to grab me with their living-dead hands, their living-dead minds, their living-dead emotions and needs. It's…exhausting."

"And my fault?"

He wouldn’t look at me. "I'm a dowser. You're something else. A conduit. A medium. I don't know what you are and I doubt you do either. It's not your fault, but I can't just dowse any more. Thanks to you, I'm a tuning fork. I vibrate to their presence as if they were alive and I were dead, a mere medium to be activated. I feel their pain, their undone deeds, and their broken hearts. It's too much."

What could I answer? He was right that I didn't know anything when it came to these matters. So I asked.

"When you dowse for the dead now, do you feel the same electricity we generated in Sunset Park together?"

"No. That's ours. And theirs, the dead couple's. Oh, I've sensed lust and greed in these sex killings, but nothing as positive as that."

"It was positive, for us, then, wasn’t it? I've never felt anything like that, over a grave or anywhere, with anyone." I put my hand on his on the steering wheel. "Ric. I missed you."

He turned to see me, really see me, and his mouth melted.

"Oh, Del. Delilah. Take me away. Take me away tonight."

I saw the despair in his dark eyes and nodded. I knew a prime assignment when I heard it, and I wanted this one very, very much. The tension between us had changed from our own professional problems into an unspoken need to shake ourselves loose of them.

Ric was shimmering and glinting in his soft, expensive clothes, which I now recognized as a defensive barrier against the death he wrested daily from the brutal earth.

I felt quite the glamour girl, all soft and silken folds and uncertain emotions. He read me like a book, dowsed me, and understood what I offered, wanted what I was willing to give. Only I didn't really know what that really was. So I also felt nervous, as usual.

The Los Lobos parking lot looked mundane, filled with cars not quite old enough to be interesting. Ric's was low, sleek, sexy, a quick getaway. Another barrier against death.

This time the place looked under-patronized. I noticed the frayed edges of the country-music posters on the walls and saw the gouges in the wood plank floor.

I ordered an Albino Vampire to my specs, watching the waitress scribble down the directions. Ric ordered the same, cocking a dark eyebrow at me.

"That's a pretty potent cocktail. You trying to get me drunk, Querida?

"Not until we get home, hombre."

"Su casa or mi casa?”

"Do you have uno perro?"

"No. No dog. Do you have uno Spanish dictionary?"

"Si."

Trumpets and mariachis hailed us to the dance floor.

I was beginning to get the rhythm. One-two-three. Oomph. I didn't care this time what the onlookers would think. I was desperate to distract Ric from the awful job he'd had to do. Werewolves did the two-step, but so did my disordered emotions, wanting to soothe him, envelop him, ease him, please him, and end the angst.

When he jerked my elastic waistband down over my hips, below my navel, I put my hands on his shoulders. One-two-three, seduce. He buried his face in my neck and shoulder, pushed my torso into his. I so wanted this man to find salvation in me, or that elusive state that haunted Edgar Allan Poe kept searching for, surcease. Was this sex? Or something else?

Right now I was haunted by something that ate at my stomach and burned in my throat. I had to tell Ric, warn him. He needed to understand that I might be even more…touchy…now.

"Ric, this wasn’t anything like what you experienced in Mexico, but while you were gone-"

"What happened?" His profile had grown sharp before his face turned to me. He'd interrogated hundreds of suspects. He knew when they were aching to conceal something.

"Haskell happened."

"That pig. How? Why?"

"When I was investigating the Inferno I ran into one of the Seven Deadly Sins' lead singer's groupies."

"Cocaine. Yeah, I've heard of him. A very bad player."

"His groupies are crazy. This one and I had a brief encounter."

"You into girls, chica?”

"Not that kind." I slapped his shoulder playfully.

Making a joke of my story was a calming technique. Ric could sense the tension in my back muscles. I could feel his hands smoothing them even as we danced.

"Short story: this Cocaine character was out pressing the groupie flesh in person and stopped to play with my hair in passing. The video cameras recorded this one woman trying to get a lock of my hair afterward as a souvenir. That creeped me out, so I told her back off. She turned up dead the next morning in the hotel Dumpster. Haskell came to my cottage and arrested me."

"For what?"

"For questioning."

"Arrested? Just for questioning? That's not procedure. Oh. You don't mean handcuffs?"

He had stopped dancing so we just stood there while other couples flashed their moves around us. We stood motionless, in each other's arms, so close our breaths fell into comforting sync. It was getting harder to pretend I'd shrugged off an ugly and traumatic moment.

I just nodded. "I knew a very personal pat-down wasn’t procedure."

"How personal?"

"For the barrel of his gun, very."

Ric dropped my hands, a good thing because his had become very hard fists. He muttered some Spanish curses too low and too fast for me and my handy little Street Spanish book to translate.

"Hector's security system got the incident on tape," I told Ric, wanting to defuse him. "Haskell's screwed."

"Jesus! You were taped being manhandled?"

"Hector's destroyed every security tape but a copy he gave me, to use if I want to bring charges. Or destroy. I'm only mentioning that I might be a little…twitchy about being touched right now."

"Querida." Ric pulled me closer, put his forehead to mine. We began swaying to a slow dance, a slow-motion floating island amid a stream of frenetic salsa-dancing couples.

"Forget that. Forget Haskell. You're with me now. I'll make it better."

"It just might have triggered my old phobia. I might not be…what you expect or want. Too much trouble."

"You're trouble, all right. The kind that makes me very twitchy. Let's get out of here. I know just the place to soothe all your cares and woes."

"Really? Where?"

"My place."

We left before the werewolves had really begun to dance, but it wasn’t a full-moon night anyway.

Ric opened the Corvette's passenger door. The car was a low-riding hammock with rocket power. The seat was already half-reclined by design, but at least he didn't bother snapping the seat belt for me. Not being belted in didn't worry me. Ric drove as if he was one with the car, fast and powerful, outrunning everything… Juarez, Haskell, my old nagging fears.

The low car thrummed along the asphalt as it wove its way out of the mountains, clinging to every curve with a dreamy sense of deja vu. Again the powerful engine vibrations massaged my spine. Again Ric's hand moved on the stick shift, up, down, across, and I felt my body sway with the motion. After a while, all my cares and woes had been outrun. I was only here, only now, only with him.

He seemed to sense my evolution from edgy fear to edgy interest.

No full moon flirted with us through the Vette's blue-tinted glass roof. No werewolves haunted the hills as they ran through the freedom of their change.

It was just us and the night, and this time he wasn’t taking me to be dropped off primly at my cottage door.

This time he was taking me home with him.