Silent Victim - C. E. Lawrence [101]
Her words echoed in his head. Sometimes all that’s needed is to know someone cares about you. He wondered who, if anyone, cared about the man they were pursuing.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
The Jack Hammer was loud and crowded, smelling of stale beer and semen. Smoke swirled from dozens of cigarettes, sucked upward toward the bare blue lightbulbs hanging from the low ceiling. The sight that greeted Elena Krieger was like a Brueghel painting of hell. Writhing bodies twisted and snaked around each other on the dance floor, glistening with sweat and hormones, oozing desire into the close, fetid air. Into this atmosphere she strolled, her feather boa wrapped nonchalantly around her elegant neck. She tried to walk with a bored, world-weary saunter, but her left hand clutching the tiny leather purse hanging from her shoulder and the tightness around her eyes gave her away. Much as she tried to pretend otherwise, she was new to this scene.
She picked her way across the room, sidestepping the cluster of bodies, hugging the wall until she reached the bar. She slid onto a stool and surveyed the people around her. At the far end of the bar, a pair of young thugs with tattooed biceps had their tongues down each other’s throats while their hands caressed each other’s crotches. Elena swallowed hard and took a deep breath. She had been prepared for a raw scene, but this was a rough crowd—she fought back a creeping panic and fear that she might, for once, be out of her depth. Her forehead tingled as she forced her face to remain expressionless, calling on her acting training to keep her cool.
“Hey there—what are you drinking?”
She turned to see a strapping young man standing next to her. He leered at her, his eyes cloudy with booze and, she thought, drugs. He wore a white muscle shirt over ironed blue jeans, and a leather thong necklace with a single seashell hung around his bronzed neck. He was a good-looking blond with sensual, pouty lips and deep-set blue eyes—in fact, he reminded her of a cruder version of Captain Morton. His voice was high and light, with a pronounced outer-borough accent—Queens, maybe—but no trace of a lisp. There was nothing remotely feminine about him—on the street, she thought, he could pass for straight. She just hoped she could pass for a tranny—this would be her first test.
“I’ll have what you’re having,” she said in her deepest voice, which was half an octave lower than his. She made no attempt to cover her German accent—she hoped it would be a turn-on to some of these guys.
“Good choice,” he said, and signaled the bartender without taking his eyes off her. “I never seen you here before. This your first time?”
“Yes,” she said as he handed her a sweating bottle of Brooklyn Brown.
“Bottoms up,” he said, clinking bottles with her.
“Here’s to anything else that comes up,” she said.
He laughed and took a drink, wiping his mouth with a bare, muscular forearm. “So, where are you from? Austria or someplace?”
“Germany, actually.”
He laughed again and took another drink.
“That’s cool, that’s cool. They got places like this over there?”
“Oh, sure, plenty—in Berlin,” she guessed. She had never been to Berlin.
“Cool,” he said, gulping down some more beer.
Even in the dim light, she could see that his eyes were bloodshot, the pupils contracted, and there was a noticeable tremor in his hands. She considered what drugs he might be on, and guessed cocaine—and maybe something else as well. She swallowed some beer and looked around the room. Elena didn’t like drugs—she had seen too many people flip out on them.
“So what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” he asked, draining the remainder of his beer in one long swallow. He tossed the bottle into a trash can behind the bar and flicked his hand toward the bartender, a gigantic black man with a shaved head, a tiny gold earring, and a swirl of colorful tattoos on his powerful arms. Elena wondered if they were prison tattoos. He wore an expression of grim stoicism as he tended to his increasingly