A Taste of the Nightlife (33 page)

Sevarin was silent for a long, nerve-racking moment. “Thank you, Charlotte,” he said softly. “But unfortunately, no. I would feel better, but I would still have the broken leg, and you would be much weakened.”

“Yeah. Okay.” I tried not to sound relieved. Anatole had already . . . saved me. Again. I should trust him. Why didn’t I trust him?

I decided not to think about that either. I looked at the door. We still had to get out of here. I looked at the shelves behind me, loaded with produce,
mise en place
, and bins and buckets of everything from ground beef to salad dressing. I looked at the door again.

“Fine,” I said. “We’ll do this the hard way.”

I rolled up my sleeves and set to work.

By the time someone came through the walk-in door, I was gritting my teeth to keep them from chattering. I’d switched the light off again and held a rock-hard butternut squash up to my shoulder like I thought I was about to hit a home run. Anatole was back on his side, with the black bag draped loosely across his face.

“Okay, Chef C, time to go,” said a familiar voice.

Taylor Watts parted the plastic flaps. Perfect. I held myself very still.

My ex-bartender took one step into the cooler, hit the Italian salad dressing I’d smeared across the floor and did a perfect Three Stooges pratfall—legs flying, arms flapping, eyes bugged out, loud “whagh!” and best of all, the sharp crack of his skull against the floor. He struggled, but I brought the squash down hard on his forehead. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he went as limp as a vamp at high noon.

I dropped my vegetable, kicked Taylor on the shoulder to slide him out of the way and turned to Anatole.

“Get out of here, Charlotte. Call the police.”

“Sorry. It’s payback time.”

Anatole was a big guy, but he didn’t weigh more than a full sack of flour. That was good, because otherwise I never would have been able to haul him out of there, especially since I had to walk across my own booby trap to do it.

“Can you hear anybody?” I murmured.

“No, but that doesn’t mean we are alone. Charlotte, you have to get out of here.”

“Working on it.”

The kitchen was dark and silent. So far, so good. “We’ll call the cops on the house phone and then . . .”

“Put the vampire down, Chef Caine.”

Pamela Maddox, not one perfectly styled blond hair out of place, walked through the swinging door and smiled.

There are days it truly sucks to be right.

25

Pamela Maddox wore a Hillary Clinton pantsuit with only a push-up bra underneath it. Given her level of endowment, she looked like she had a baby butt mooning the world from out of her perfectly tailored jacket.

I considered bolting, but with my arms full of vampire there was no way I would make it to the exit before Pamela caught up with me, even though she was wearing platform pumps. And that was before I saw Julie and Tommy the Hench Vamps come sauntering in behind her.

“Sorry,” I murmured to Anatole as I set him on the floor near an empty counter.

“It was an excellent attempt.”

Pamela sighed and shook her head at us. “I told Taylor to be careful.”

“Yeah, well, he always was pretty useless.” I put my hands in my empty pockets and tried not to seem like I was looking around. If she would just come a little closer . . . There was a tenderizing mallet in easy reach, just waiting to make contact with her perfectly made-up face.

“You don’t seem surprised to see me, Charlotte.”

“It wasn’t that hard to figure out.” Eventually. Once I realized it had to be either Shelby or a Maddox. Robert had pointed out that Shelby was never in charge of the actual crimes he’d been involved with. He liked to be able to skedaddle and leave other people to take the blame when things went bad. So it had to be a Maddox. It couldn’t have been Margot or Ian, because Brendan had been watching them, and he would have checked on when they’d actually arrived in the city, because he was much less into denial than I was and would want to eliminate Margot right away. That left Cousin Pam.

“So, now what?” I said out loud.

“Now you listen to me very carefully,” Pamela said. “Because you’ve only had a small taste of how miserable I can make things for you and your little nightblood brother.”

“Not as miserable as you made them for Cousin Dylan,” I said.

“Silly-dilly,” she murmured, like someone remembering the good old days of tweaking pigtails and dropping cats down wells. “He thought he was being so clever.”

“He did find you when none of your other family could.”

“And we have Chet Caine to thank for that.” She smiled at me and Julie smirked. “If I were you, Charlotte, I’d have a talk with your brother.”

“Not that she’s going to have a chance,” murmured Tommy, gliding past his boss. “Dibs on the neck.”

“Touch her and I will come back from hell itself to destroy you,” said Anatole, and I think that frightened me way more than it did Tommy.

“Now, now, boys.” Pammy smiled indulgently. “There’s no reason to be rude. We can discuss our business in a civilized fashion. Especially since as dense as she is, Chef Caine knows I can have her and her boyfriend here killed in a New York minute if she steps out of line.”

Which unfortunately was true. “What do you want from me?”

“Nothing at all.” Pamela drifted around the edge of the prep counter, trailing her long, perfect fingernails across the stainless steel. “After this little matter of the contraband on your premises is cleared up, you and Chet will be opening Nightlife again. You will find yourself in need of a new bartender.” She stopped just out of reach. “I will give you a name. You will hire that person and go back to your kitchen.”

A new bartender. A new bartender and a bucket of human blood among all the other containers of blood at my restaurant, which served vampires. . . . “You want to turn Nightlife into a blood dive.”

She shrugged. “It’s going to happen, Charlotte. It’s just a question of whether you live through the process or not. At least with me, you know you get to keep your management position.”

Before I could think of anything to say, a loud, muffled thud sounded behind me.

“Bitch!” I could barely hear the bellow of outrage through the glass. “I’m gonna kill you!”

Pam rolled her baby blues. “Tommy, go let Taylor out of the walk-in.”

Grinning wide enough to show both fangs, Tommy went and released the lock on the walk-in. A very green around the gills Taylor Watts staggered two steps forward, choked and reeled to the hand-washing sink. Pam winced and started to say something.

I scooped up Anatole and ran, making my best guess at the direction of the back door. Lousy time to be wrong. I came up in the employee locker room. Abrupt reversals aren’t easy when carrying a full-grown vampire, but I managed. Pamela was bearing down, so I took the only other out offered and ducked into the office. I dumped Anatole in the desk chair, slammed the door, locked it, and snatched up the phone. A stack of invoices on the desk told me I was in the kitchen of Post Mortem.

Oh, why am I not surprise?

“You’ll be dead before anyone can get here, Charlotte,” called Pam through the window. “Both of you.”

My hand froze over the phone keypad.

“Dead and drained.” The flirtatious little-girl lilt had entirely left her voice. “And then since I won’t have you around to keep your brother in line, I’ll have to alert the boys I sent down to Arizona to pick up your parents.”

“You’re bluffing!”

“Maybe, but you’re the one behind a highly breakable glass window with no exit except through me. Maybe you could get past me on your own, but hauling poor Anatole? Of course, you could just leave him, but I don’t need him for anything and when the sun comes up, I’ll just toss him out into the alley.”

“If I am so very superfluous, why did you bother bringing me here?” inquired Anatole.

She shrugged. “You were making a nuisance of yourself.”

“Son of a bitch,” added Taylor. He’d propped himself up against the wall and looked about as healthy as Anatole. The lovely bruise blossoming across his temple was a very small triumph.

“What about Chet’s spa?” I asked, stalling for time.

“Oh, he’ll get to keep right on running that little operation. There will be a few changes, of course, to reflect new executive thinking.” Pammy’s eyes gleamed. “Such a nice, isolated location and all those woods. Absolutely nobody to hear the screams.”

I wanted to scream myself, right now. I wanted to punch her in her lying face. She was a liar and a murderer and a witch from a screwed-up family, and she was the reason my life was in shreds. And there was nothing I could do but stand there beside Anatole and take it.

“You drained your own cousin and used the blood in a frame-up to take over one restaurant and one spa,” I pursed my lips like I was considering all the implications. “How’d Post Mortem come into it?”

“Bert decided he didn’t like going straight after all. Ilona and Chet had been using PM for private shareholder . . . parties where they distributed the legal blood, but he thought there might be more profit in moving a higher volume to a wider clientele. He contacted me.”

And they talked. They talked a lot. They talked about expanding distribution, and weak links, like Chet and the Nebbish.

“You should know Shelby has a history of running out on his employers,” I said.

Pamela shrugged again. “You work with what you have. I thought you’d appreciate that.”

“Brendan’s going to be looking for us.”

This statement did not have anything like its intended effect. Pamela gave a bubbly little laugh that would have done Lolita proud. “In case you hadn’t noticed, Brendan couldn’t find his ass with a flashlight and a GPS. Or did he fool you with that high-powered office on Fifty-fourth?” I didn’t answer and she shook her head. “God, doesn’t anybody do their homework? Listen, Charlotte, my dear cousin’s in debt up to his charmingly shaggy hairline, right along with the rest of the family. He needs the city contract at least as much as they do. I would have tried to bring him into my business because—you should excuse the expression—blood’s thicker. But no. He’s also fastidious and prefers his white-collar graft.”

“Brendan’s out to cheat the city?” I didn’t believe it. Okay, I didn’t want to believe it. But with the rest of his family in debt, and so much money at stake . . . people fudged their CVs for less.

“Whereas I am an entrepreneur with a product which is in great demand.” Modesty practically oozed out the ends of her immaculately styled hair. “I just needed an outlet.”

“Bitch, please.”

“Manners, Charlotte. You don’t want me to wash your mouth out with soap, now do you?”

I almost said, “Try it,” but I remembered just in time what Brendan said: whatever else she was, Pamela Maddox was still a witch.

“So, Dylan Maddox tracked you down,” said Anatole. W
ith some help from Chet and Marcus the Nebbish, who were looking for a way to get her off their case,
I added silently. “And not appreciating your entrepreneurial spirit, he threatened to get the family to shut you down. Blood being thicker and, incidentally, more lucrative, you killed him for it.”

I bit my lip and glanced at Anatole. I couldn’t tell anything about what he was thinking, but we had to keep playing for time.

“What about the other bodies?” I asked. “There were four other syringe drainings.”

“Trial runs,” said Pam with a calm that tied my stomach into fresh knots. “We needed to be sure we could continue to supply quality merchandise. And, of course, we needed the right people to know that our network should not be interfered with.”

Which made sense in a horror-movie kind of way. I bit my lip. What next? What now? If I could keep her talking long enough, maybe a way out would materialize. I had to focus on that. Pam Maddox needed me to deal with Chet and to hang on to Nightlife, which would double the human blood outlets she controlled. There’d be another chance to get us out of this, if I could just get the time. Maybe I’d get to clock Taylor again in the process.

I hesitated too long. “I’m so glad we’ve had this little chat,” said Pam brightly. “But you do realize, Charlotte, that if I have to come in there and get you, I’m going to be feeling much less charitable.”

I felt something nudging at my mind. A memory, of Taylor and Anatole. The last time I’d seen Taylor it’d been in a kitchen too . . .

I saw our chance, and I knew it was Anatole who put the idea in my head. That was something we’d talk about later. Right now I had to try to deal with these . . . these things holding us. They’d made a mistake. A big one. They didn’t know they had not one weak link but two.

And they were trying to hold a chef in a kitchen.

“Okay,” I whispered, to myself and to Anatole. He nodded, just barely.

“Okay?” Pammy cocked her head.

“You win.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t hear that.”

“You win. It’s yours.” I spread my arms, and then let them fall so they flapped against my thighs. “Take it. Nightlife, the spa, the whole thing. Just . . . just leave Chet alone, okay? He’s no threat to your operation.”