The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [43]
There was something about her, something curious and familiar, and as the threat of the song’s ending reared its prospective head, Andrew forced a stutter of dialogue for fear of never again having the opportunity.
“I see you’re with the press over there. You’re here by yourself?”
She seemed pleasantly set aback by the sudden question and widened her smile. “What?” she tossed her voice above the music, then, “I’m here with the press. I’m with a magazine. Actually, it’s a newsletter. But I’m here to have a good time more than anything. Even if I have to let loose by myself.”
“I hardly ever dance,” Andrew admitted.
“You gotta speak louder,” his partner shouted.
“I don’t dance very much.”
“I haven’t danced in ages. I hardly get the chance anymore. How’d you hear about this?”
“The concert? I knew about it probably before most anyone else did. “I see Ralston all the time. More often than I’d like....”
“You’re friends with him? Can I throw a few questions at you?”
Andrew resisted the freshly dreadful web of insight seeping into his restless self-confidence upon the notion of Ralston-mania being responsible for this woman’s actual intentions. A repeated glance towards the portly beast of Ralston’s agent gave Andrew the suspicion that this dance was indebted to the agent’s company at Andrew’s table; Behn turned away any and all who approached the table with the unnerving recognition of who he was. This gossip-sleuth was probably the smarter of the litter, hitting on Andrew instead.
He’d rather shun those thoughts, he admitted to himself.
There was something about this woman, and for all he knew she was hitting on him for simpler reasons.
For all he hoped.
The music stopped, the number was over. And so was the dance, so were his expectations.
Until she pointed out her lonely press table and how she could sure use a dose of company, if only he’d excuse himself from his friends and join her for a little while.
Fuck her intentions, Andrew rested the issue with the immediate clasp of her hand amidst the thunderous applause for Squid Friction’s chimp nipple song. Any diversion from his “friends’” company was a slice of paradise.
And, by the suggestive stew of wanton lust stirred by the slice of paradise diverting him away from the dance floor and into the direction of press tables, Andrew could care less what she wanted him for.
For heaven’s sake and all the saints, meet someone....
....tonight may very well be a night of nights....
It bothered Andrew: Bari and those trivial prophecies of hers.
***
A shabby grey shape shifted, watched in patient surveillance and with such tamed anticipation as can only be found among the damned baring a scheme to redeem themselves.
Such schemes were among the damned tonight.
And such schemes made them patient.
They learned to be so, and it was a lesson as twisted and as unbearably torturous as the very lives they had come to lead, as was the manner in which they destroyed other lives in turn.
The shabby grey shape drew no attention to himself, sat still and silent except to calmly scratch his brillo pad beard and the razor blade wounds healing and irritated beneath it. Draped in the overcoat of a street pauper and perched atop a bar stool at the far corner of the bar, against the wall and opposite the stage, he sat and gazed out alertly into the Crow Job night crowd like a jackal deliberating the advent of a kill.
There was a lovely couple, an unsuspecting couple, sharing a table together somewhere midway between the bar end and the brass rails of the entranceway steps.
He watched them. They were important to him.
Two individuals, after their dance, sat down at the center of the last row of tables in the press section. He knew who they were, knew of them, and they seemed interested in each other.
He was interested in them. He watched them, too, though not as keenly as he did the lovely couple.
And then there was the singer, the stage misfit,