I found myself a nice, private alley about two blocks from the black door with the red circle around the knob and slouched against the wall, not giving a damn about the stink of garbage in the air. It was only then I noticed the thing I clutched in my left hand—a little glassy black ring. The blood on it obscured the vein of red that ran through the black, but I didn’t have to see it to know it was there. I must have pulled the thing off her in our little tussle … Or had that slap-happy dame slipped it to me like some kind of nasty calling card? There was no telling with a Mata Hari like that one, and just then I couldn’t be troubled to care. I stuffed the ring into my pocket, fished out a handkerchief, and managed to stanch the flow of blood from my left wrist some. It looked like hell and my legs felt rubbery under me but I figured I’d live. My gut and my shoulder stung and bled but already the shallow slashes were starting to scab up. No question I was a bloody mess, but now that the panic and the intoxication were fading some, I started to get the impression that my injuries might not be as bad as I’d first thought, even if they stung like hell. I wasn’t dead, anyway. I decided to count myself lucky that Damia Nyx’s jaws hadn’t torn my jugular right out of my neck.
For a minute or five, I huddled there, willing my heart to slow down, my breathing to stop coming out in rasps. Whatever she’d gotten into me—and I had a pretty good feeling it had been something more than plain old booze—had burned off fast when the adrenaline hit, but I still needed that pause to get my head back together. Already the whole scene had taken on the feeling of a fevered delusion; if it hadn’t been for the cuts, I might’ve sold myself on the idea it had all happened in my head. Hell, now that I was out of it, I couldn’t say for sure how much of it had been real. I wondered if I’d ever know.
I rubbed my temples and tried to make my brain work.
One thing was sure—a man in my state, half-dressed and sticky with his own claret, couldn’t just flag down a cab to get himself wherever he might need to go for help—even if cabs came anywhere near this part of town. And I felt pretty certain I needed some help. Fortunately for me, among all the boarded-up shops and abandoned apartment buildings on the ugly side of the river, a fair number of pay-by-the-hour hotels clung to life, places where the clerks make it a policy not to ask questions, whatever the clientele looked like. I stumbled into one with no name and tossed some cash on the front desk, where an old fella sat smoking a fat cigar and playing solitaire with a deck of girlie-picture cards. He raised a bushy eyebrow when he got a good look at me, then put it back down when he saw the cash.
“Name?” he said, around the stogie.
“John Smith,” I said.
“Amazing,” the fella said, fishing something out of a cubby hole, tossing me a key on a brown plastic fob that had 4F printed on it, “third one tonight.”
The room was cramped and dark, dirty sheets on the bed and yawning brown water stains on the ceiling. The air sat thick and stagnant, heavy with a smell I didn’t want to think too much about. But it had running water and, amazingly, a working phone, and that would do for the time being.
I cleaned up, ruining the one dubious looking towel dangling on the hook by the yellow sink, then tore the towel to shreds and patched myself up as best I could. With that done, I grabbed the phone and made a quick call, then dropped onto the bed and let my eyes slide closed. Then for some time I meandered in and out of a ragged doze. I could hear that lunatic music from Club Erebus, clear one minute and garbled the next, like a badly tuned radio station, and once I thought I saw Damia Nyx smiling in the window at me, that same sinful-sweet expression, and even after everything that had happened I tried to get up and let her in, but my limbs weren’t interested in the idea so I just stayed put and stared at her. And then she wasn’t there anyway, and almost certainly never had been.
A light, urgent knocking shook me to groggy wakefulness, and I stared at the window a second or two before I realized the sound came from the door. Mustering my strength, I climbed to my feet and stumbled to it. I held my gun at my side, low and ready, then opened the door on its useless brass chain.
“You look like hell,” Doc Ambrus said, by way of greeting.
“If I look good, I don’t need you,” I answered, closing the door so I could slip the chain off. “You sure you weren’t followed?”
“Who’s gonna follow me?” Doc said, looking back over his shoulder like he was challenging someone to pop out of the shadows behind him. I had a couple of thoughts on that matter, but didn’t figure he’d care for them much. With a quick glance of my own up and down the hall, I let him in and closed the door behind us and locked it, put the chain back in place, for whatever it was worth.
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” Doc said, dropping his black bag on the bed and pushing me down to sit beside it.
“I’m not exactly having fun here myself,” I told him.
“So what was it this time? Some crazed vixen, couldn’t get enough of you, tried to take your privates for a keepsake?”
“You sound like you were there.”
He peeled away my makeshift bandages and daubed the cuts with boiling acid that came from a bottle cleverly disguised as disinfectant. I tried not to bite my tongue off, swallowing that pain. The weapon that had drawn those clever red lines hadn’t hurt half that much and I think Doc knew it, too. I saw the amused smirk on his lips. The sadistic bastard.
“You need to find a gentler playmate,” Doc said, now cleaning up my wrist, now stabbing me with a small needle full of something amber-colored. My arm went numb and he began to sew. “Take that secretary of yours, Miss … what is it?”
“O’Clare,” I said. “Cass. Short for Cassandra.”
“Miss O’Clare, yes. The lovely Miss O’Clare. Why haven’t you two given into one another’s charms yet?”
“Cass is a nice girl. She deserves better than a lug like me.” The truth of it stung about as much as any of my wounds.
“Can’t argue with that,” Doc grunted.
“Anyway, you know I’m married to my work. That’s plenty. Too much, sometimes.”
Doc raised an eyebrow, studied my still-swollen face. “Can’t argue with that, either.”
“What’s it matter to you, anyway?”
He shrugged. “Am I your doctor or not? I’m only trying to keep you from going all to pieces.”
“Just take care of my body. I’ll worry about the rest.”
Doc dropped scissors into his bag and snapped it shut.
“Your body’s fine as it’s gonna be. I don’t think you lost too much blood. Probably looked like more than it was.”
It looked like plenty, I thought, splashed all over her naked body, smeared around her mouth. I didn’t say anything.
“Still, we probably ought to get some fluids in you.”
“All I need’s a lift to the office, thanks.”
Doc shrugged again. “Your funeral,” he said, and we left together.
Stepping into my office felt a bit like coming to my senses. Even in her absence, the reassuring sense of Cass’s level-headed pragmatism calmed my nerves some.
All the same, when I got back behind the door marked Private, I watered down some of my remaining bourbon and made an attempt at filling my veins with that. The stuff burned going down and hit my head almost at once, making my eyes swim, but I didn’t much care. It was a distraction from gashes and wounds old and new, and that was enough. And it helped me forget about the clock counting away the hours. Hours with no Evelyn.
I was sure I’d lost her for good, after whatever the hell had happened tonight. I’d finally got all the information she wanted and I’d never see her again to give it to her. Who knew, maybe she had a new name, wherever she was. Or maybe she’d ended up someplace where she didn’t need a name anymore.
I sat, listening to the insect buzz of the hotel sign just outside my window, and tried again to reconstruct what had happened in that strange room buried away beneath the west side. But the whole thing seemed more and more like a crazy dream, passion and hunger twisting into giddy, clawing fear, and nothing making any sense. Only the gauze on my neck and stomach and the stitches in my wrist convinced me it had happened at all.
I swallowed some bourbon straight and let it wash me away for a time.