"The Undead Kama Sutra" - читать интересную книгу автора (Acevedo Mario)

Chapter 9

Carmen’s brisk, angry steps churned the sand as we returned to her cabin.

“Fuck,” she kept repeating.

“You mean about the missing chalice or the deputy?” Deputy Johnson had told Carmen that she had to ride to Big Pine Key in his boat. We were on the way to her cabin to change clothes before we left.

“Both,” answered Carmen. “I was hoping to find her alive. She was a doll. Christ, now we got the goddamn authorities involved. What the hell happened to Marissa anyway?”

“Maybe it’s not her in the morgue.”

“Keep believing that, Felix. She’s been missing for three days and poof, this peckerwood comes around asking me to identify a body.”

We entered the cabin. Carmen plucked a sundress from a peg on the wall. “Naw.” She put the dress back on the peg and bent over to shift through a basket of laundry. She pulled out a tiny red tank top, whipped off her T-shirt, and stretched the tank over her head and torso. The tank looked as thin as a coat of paint. “How’s this?”

“I thought you didn’t want Johnson to stare.”

“The more he stares, the more that lech stays distracted.”

We put on our contacts. No telling how long we’d have to be among humans and we’d better take care to remain disguised. I got a T-shirt and boating mocs.

Carmen gathered her hair into a ponytail and pulled it through a scrunchie to hold it in place. She pushed her feet into a pair of flip-flops.

We rounded up her chalice Thorne. Poor guy had an ice pack on his crotch. Strapping or not, sex with Carmen had put his connecting unit through the wringer. The three of us returned to the dock. Johnson sat on a wharf piling. When he saw Carmen, he immediately stood at attention. His mouth gaped and his eyebrows arced over the top of his sunglasses. I expected his eyeballs would come flying through the lenses.

Carmen climbed aboard Johnson’s boat and Thorne and I got in the Bayliner. The two boats motored out of the bay and turned northeast from Snipe Keys. The sun hovered above us.

I went to the front of the Bayliner and stretched out on the deck. As a vampire, I never thought that I’d get a chance to work on my tan.

I watched Carmen and Johnson in his boat. They talked and he wrote on his memo pad, but I couldn’t hear what they said. I slipped off my contacts and read their auras. Carmen’s orange glow bristled with annoyance. Johnson’s red aura bubbled with lust, even though the conversation should have been about a dead body.

While I baked like a ham, I thought about what was happening around me. I came to Florida in search of the author of The Undead Kama Sutra. Then Odin’s mortally wounded alien impersonator hired me to find his killer and, in his dying breath, offered the name Goodman. And he added that little gem of needing to save the Earth women. Then the Araneum warned me about aliens and made a puzzling reference to a crashed charter airplane.

Next I found Carmen, leader of the Denver nidus, who turned out to be recreating this Kama Sutra. She’s also found the secret that keeps vampires from withering in the sun and she’s co-owner of a resort for vampires and their groupies. One of her chalices was missing. And now, Deputy Johnson asked us to identify a body.

I’m after the one who murdered Odin and within days a second corpse turns up. Suspicious? Definitely.

Because of my experience with psychic powers and the supernatural, I am aware of a grand cosmic design that binds our actions with what we call coincidences. In this case, what connected the many, many dots?

We continued east, parallel to the Keys. Dozens of boats cruised around us and we rocked over their wakes. Small airplanes droned overhead.

Our two boats approached a concrete pier, beyond which stood a jumble of nondescript, rectangular buildings on Big Pine Key. An American flag snapped from a pole erected on a lawn between the pier and the buildings. The Bayliner’s engine slowed to a putter.

We berthed alongside an assortment of boats representing the agencies working the Keys: Monroe County Sheriff’s Office, DEA, Department of Fisheries, and the Coast Guard.

We docked next to Johnson’s boat and, after I tossed the bowline to an attendant, Carmen and I disembarked and left the Bayliner in the care of her chalice.

Johnson saw that I followed him and he halted. “It won’t take two of you to make an ID.”

“I want Felix to keep me company,” Carmen said. “Or do the corpses complain about too many visitors?”

Johnson relented with a brisk wave of his hand. He led us around the largest building, past a parking lot, and through the entrance of the Medical Examiner’s Office.

Government buildings always gave me the willies. Everything seemed stamped with “official business” as the worker cogs turned on their petty duties and counted the days to retirement. It was like a treadmill in a mausoleum.

Johnson had us wait at a counter while he went ahead. The clerk behind the counter was a sad-faced, middle-aged woman. She did a double take at Carmen.

The clerk’s pale scalp showed from under wispy strands dyed henna-red, with silver roots. Ignoring us, she perked up and clicked a remote toward a television sitting beside a water cooler.

She increased the volume for a commercial of a product called NuGrumatex. Photos showed a man with a monk’s crown surrounding a bald pate smooth as a balloon. More photos and a video clip had the same man running and playing tennis-activities that demonstrated how his youthful vigor had been restored by the growth of new, thick hair. The next photos showed a woman suffering with bald patches where her head had been gnawed at by alopecia areata. She looked as miserable as a cold, wet dog, and wore a school-marmish blouse cinched tight against her throat. In her “after” photos, she had the luxurious curls of a forties cheesecake pinup with bare shoulders, inviting cleavage, and come-do-me-now smile.

The clerk nodded self-consciously and touched her thinning hair. The commercial segued into the usual rapid-fire disclaimers, which I tuned out, except for increased salivation and heightened libido. How wonderful. Thanks to modern pharmaceuticals, America could now be a nation of hairy, drooling, horny nimrods.

As the ad faded, it mentioned the Swiss conglomerate Riz#232;-Blu Pharmaceutique, Making Your Life Better Than Ever^™. I’d seen a rash of Riz#232;-Blu’s ads lately, as if their marketing department had gotten the hives.

Deputy Johnson returned. Maybe that pompadour of his was courtesy of NuGrumatex. But the only thing that made him drool now was Carmen.

Johnson had the desk clerk sign us in and issue visitors’ badges. He led us past one door, a turn, then to a steel door, where we stopped beside a cart piled with paper face masks and disposable booties.

“Put these on,” he said. “For your protection.”

Carmen turned her back to Johnson and rolled her eyes.

Once we all put on masks and booties, Johnson swiped his ID badge through a reader on the wall. The lock on the steel door retracted with a snap.

We entered a morgue. The chilled air smelled of antibacterial cleaner and decaying human flesh. The door made another snap when it closed behind us.

At our end, with its collection of bottles and jars and the white decor, the room looked like a science lab.

Johnson introduced us to the medical examiner, a woman in her thirties, dressed in green scrubs, matching head cover, and a paper face mask. Because of the silver piercings in her ears and her trendy glasses, I would have expected to find her serving lattes instead of sawing through cadavers.

The morgue extended into an open examination area with a steel table in the center of a linoleum floor. A white sheet covered a corpse on a table. The examiner went to a computer monitor and tapped on the screen to bring up her files.

Johnson walked to the table and grasped a corner of the sheet. “We found Jane Doe this morning. Hopefully you can give us her real name.”

Carmen looked at the corpse. “Why are you asking me?”

“Just take a look,” he answered.

Carmen and I stood alongside the table directly opposite of Johnson.

He pulled back the sheet and uncovered Jane Doe’s head. The eyes were clouded marbles recessed into the dark, wrinkled pits of the eye sockets. A delicate nose pointed from a face molded of spotty, darkened flesh pressed against the skull. Black hair jutted from her scalp in matted tangles. As an amateur specialist in corpses, I guessed the woman had been dead three days. Too bad; alive she must have been a looker.

Something had left ragged edges at the lobes of Jane Doe’s ears and the loose skin of her throat.

I looked at Johnson.

“Crabs,” he said. “They had a munchfest.”

Carmen’s foot nudged against mine and pressed. The movement was deliberate yet secretive. What was she trying to signal?

Johnson leaned against a file cabinet and drummed his fingers. “Well?”

Carmen pulled her foot from mine. She returned Johnson’s gaze and shrugged. “Who is this?”

Johnson stopped drumming his fingers. His eyebrows slanted downward and wrinkled the skin over the bridge of his nose. “Your missing guest was Marissa Albert. This isn’t her?”

“Nope.”

Johnson pulled the sheet back but kept his attention on Carmen. “Are you sure?”

The knobs of Jane Doe’s shoulders were splayed back as rigor mortis had arched her spine upward. Her breasts lay flat against the rib cage like a pair of rotting apples. There were more spots of hamburger lacerations where the crabs had fed.

“Holy shit,” Carmen pointed, “what happened there?”

In the center of the woman’s sternum was a deep, thumb-sized hole lined with charred flesh.

My fingers tingled as my vampire sense went on full alert. The wound was identical to Gilbert Odin’s. Jane Doe had been killed with an alien blaster.