Greywalker - Kat Richardson [87]
The Adult Fantasies building was a sharply pointed triangle. Full-height windows at the point opened up a view right through the fetish wear and lingerie. I pulled open the plate glass door, went past the stairs that led to the video parlor and “home of live girls,” and into the store proper. To my left was the clothing: on my right, the stuff even a sex shop doesn’t put in the window. Ahead was a glass counter of X-rated impulse items, guarded by a cash register and a Goth girl.
Her hair was deep, oily purple, her face rice-powder white around black lips and battered-raccoon eyes. Two small, black niobium rings pierced her right eyebrow and a fine silver chain connected the ring in her left nostril to one in her left ear. For balance, the earring on the right was a heavy black spiderweb with its ruby resident dangling within. A studded leather collar with swags of chain imprisoned her neck. She glanced at me over a notebook she had spread on the countertop. Realizing I was coming straight to her, she closed the book and put her pen down on top of it.
She looked midtwenties, though she sounded like a teenager. “Hi, did you have a question?”
“Is Carlos in?”
“Oh, he’s around. Probably upstairs. Just a second.” She looked around the store and spotted a young man over in the only dark corner the store had, crowded between vibrating plastic penises and the green-painted dressing-room doors.
She called to him. “Jason, is Carlos upstairs?”
Jason raised his head out of a cardboard shipping container filled with videotapes and looked in our direction. “I . . . um, yeah, I guess I saw him go up there about half an hour ago. One of the girls came downstairs to get him.”
“Would you go up there and tell him someone down here wants to talk to him?” she asked, displaying the kind of patience mothers have for backward children.
“What about my box?”
“I’ll keep an eye on it,” she assured him. “OK?”
“Sure. OK. I’ll go get him.” Jason slumped off toward the door.
We stood there in the vague thump of music from the rooms upstairs. Her gaze kept flickering down to her notebook. “You can look around, if you want. Sometimes it takes a while for the guys to get back downstairs. I don’t know why. I mean, they’ve seen tits before.”
I nodded. “What are you studying?”
“I’m writing an article for The Stranger, about safe sex.”
“That should be a winner.” I wondered what qualified as safe from the point of view of someone who felt the need to chain her nose on. Not wanting to cramp her writing style, I wandered around.
I was examining a black and purple leather bustier with marabou feathers around the top when I felt my stomach fall toward the floor. I turned my head. A slab-bodied, bearded man strode toward me. He wore a clot of darkness like a cape, riding on the broad shoulders of his black leather jacket. His eyes were a couple of pits under lowering, clifflike brows. He stopped a scant two feet from me and looked me over. The desire to run far and fast, shrieking, electrified my legs and caught at my throat. I quashed the urge and pivoted to face him.
He clasped his hands in front of himself. “You wanted to see me?” he rumbled.
The breath. I tried not to flinch. “Alice sent me,” I stated.
“Alice.” Glaciers react more.
“Liddell.” I stared right back at him, even though it racked me. A tremor of fright moved under my skin.
He grunted. “Let’s go to the office.” He turned, assuming I would follow him. As we passed the counter, he glanced at the Goth girl. “Keep Jason out.”
“OK,” she agreed, barely raising her head from her page.
A door next to the dressing rooms led to a small storage room with a desk and a couple of chairs shoved in among the boxes and files. Carlos went behind the desk and pointed at the chair on my side.
“Sit down.”
I did.
He folded his arms on the desktop, cupping his left elbow with his right hand. His fist was as big as a billboard against