Chapter 14

“So what killed her?”

The grey double doors were swallowing Lou, Diane and the cop. The elevator doors at the end of the corridor, like Charon deciding to mix things up, opened in offer to return them to the land of the living. The pathologist looked up, a bit of a surprised look on his face, occupational hazard, I suspect.

“My report will say ‘blunt force trauma’, but I’m getting you want more of the how and not the what, am I correct?” The pathologist held up his chart and for a moment I thought of my high school graduation.

“Yeah, tell me the how and I’m a step closer to figuring out the who.”

“This unfortunate young woman’s neck was broken. A complete dislocation of the C1 vertebrae causing catastrophic neurogenic shock. Death was almost instantaneous.”

“Can a person inflict such an injury, say, someone trained in the martial arts?”

“Very definitely. In one of the more unfortunate developments in our modern culture, movies today are far more accurate in the demonstration of how a person can be killed. Excessive and sudden rotation of the skull, in isolation from the shoulders and lower vertebrae, will kill a person instantly.”

***

“Let me drive you home.”

Somehow the sun that promised to wait for me was vanishing as I stepped away from the hospital. Still a bright edge to the horizon, there is never a mistake telling the difference between sunrise and sunset. In the waning light of an autumn’s afternoon, the body automatically goes on alert, lest the extra-dark, never-quite-still shadows in every corner decide to make their move.

Diane stepped off the sidewalk in front of the hospital’s main entrance, where she’d been standing with Lou. She was staring up at the building, lights appearing on the lower of the ten floors of glass and steel. Lou was staring at everything else. Her face caught the warm yellow light of the early sunset and glowed. Lou’s face was drenched in the same light and burned. Both were returning to where they lived their lives.

“Thanks, Ian, but I need to get back to the club. I’ve got arrangements with the funeral home to make and, as they say, the show must go on.” She looked again towards Lou with something like affection. “The sooner I get things back to normal at the ‘Bottom of the Sea’, the more likely the body count will be lesser rather than greater.”

Rather than a hug, I held out my hand.  Diane looked me in the eye and took my hand in hers and smiled.

*****

Lou stepped from the front entrance of The Bottom of the Sea Lounge, carrying an easel and a placard that read, ‘Dancer Wanted’.

Stepping back into the club, he took one of three phones he always carried, punched a number and said, “Alright, don’t do nothin, just ask around. Do? What the fuck are you asking me that for? Find out if there’s been anything going on that I need to know about. I care who you have to push, just do it. Nobody messes with my dancers or my club.”

*****

“Was machst du?! Der Job ist…” the man over-flowing the passenger seat of the late-model sedan turned, mid-complaint and looked at the driver. With the exaggerated enunciation of a sixth grade French student, he continued, “…follow the detective fellow to the girl with the information, not chase, sit idly across from some strip club.” Frustration made a naturally guttural language more like a growl than a reasonable appeal for an explanation.

“This is my op. You will speak English.” As casually as brushing lint from a friend’s collar, the young woman in the driver’s seat touched the man’s thickly muscled shoulders with two fingers and her thumb; his tattooed hand flew to his throat, his face shifted from ‘surprised’ to ‘frightened’ at the sudden paralysis of his respiratory system.

The sodium vapor lamps, every modern city’s unconscious nod to Victorian gas lights turned the nearly invisible night mist into fog. The neon lights of the Bottom of the Sea Strip Club and Lounge took on a child’s finger-painting quality, defeating it’s attempt to shout a promise of forbidden pleasure to all who might pass by.

Zhao Annchi pointed towards the tablet balanced on the cars’ console, it’s small dot blinking red on the map display, “I not only have a copy of the detective’s hard drive, I dusted his cash with antimony-123, two nights ago.”

The man’s spastic breathing smoothed into the gasps of drowning victim, laying in the relative safety of a sandy beach. Annchi smiled, the up-turning of thin lips aligning with the corners of her eyes. The fear in the man’s eyes enhanced her sense of things being right in the world. Her smile began to retreat as she recalled her nearly-perfect break-in. While waiting for the detective’s computer to spill its guts to her thumb drive, she’d noticed a large glass jar on the detective’s desk filled with small denomination bills, mostly ones and fives, on it a label: ‘Bottom of the Sea College Fund’.

“This is my op and you will behave in the manner I tell you.” Unbuttoning all but the last two buttons on her blouse, she opened the car door. Briefly leaning into the car she pointed at the man in the passenger seat and smiled, “Stay.”

Annchi walked across the street, her steps balanced and certain. When she reached the other side of the street, she took the card on the easel in front of the Bottom of the Sea Strip Club and Lounge and stepped through the glass and steel door.