Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (20 page)

    
Layla
rose from her chair after four bars of Massive Attack’s “Teardrop,” artfully
meshed with some gris-gris, trip-hop version of “Sympathy for the Devil.” She
rose weightlessly and came to where she’d danced before, her body moving like
kelp in a gentle current. She did not grant Raszer even a sidelong glance, and
it made him feel momentarily invisible, as if to exist, he had to join her.
Slowly, he stood up, strode onto the dance floor, and didn’t whisper, “Would
you like a partner?” until he’d curled his fingers gently around her waist.

    
Layla
turned fluidly, the silk fabric slipping beneath his fingers like oiled glass,
the muscles in her belly tightening just slightly. Her only assent was to allow
his hands to remain on her hips.

    
Raszer
saw MC Hakim smiling softly, eyes half-closed, nodding off to the hypnotic
rhythm. Enjoying his work. The rolling motion of his head and shoulders
mirrored Layla’s own swell. Her lips curled at the corners, watching him watch her.

    
Raszer
smiled. “I’d like to know you,” he said. “There’s a Moroccan place up the strip
that serves fresh mint tea. Can I treat?”

    
Her eyes
narrowed. “You want . . . to
know
me?” she repeated, as if hearing the word for the first time.

    
Raszer
nodded, and while he sunk into her blue-black eyes, thinking to himself that
he’d moved her with the notion that a man might want to do something other than
fuck her, her right hand fluttered down his thigh, and suddenly all nobler
intentions fled and he wanted only to be inside. Her right hip pressed his
left, and with the skill of a thief, she slipped two fingers into a tiny pocket
in the folds of her skirt and curled them around a silver-plated atomizer the
size of a lipstick case.

    
Moving
with him, seeming to find the off-beats between the strobe light’s pulses where
she would become momentarily invisible, she lifted the hand that had rested on
his right shoulder and brought it to his cheek. It was cool against his flushed
skin. The other hand, with the atomizer curled in its ring finger, ran up the
inside of his thigh to just below his groin. She looked into his eyes and said:
“Then you will know me,
ragoli
 
.”

    
Her
hand left his thigh and rode firmly over the stiffening ridge in his trousers.
Thus diverted, he didn’t see her bring the nozzle of her little silver atomizer
to just below his left nostril.
Psst
.
Psst
. He cocked an ear, thinking she’d
whispered something, then felt his center of balance lurch forward and went up
on his toes, with only her body to break his momentum. He was numbly aware of
her hands against the small of his back as he dropped his head onto her
shoulder, crushing his nose against her perfumed neck.

    
He could
walk, but without feeling the floor. He could see, but only as through a prism.
The strobe’s pulses slowed to a throb, and in the spaces between, there was
only blackness. Harry Wolfe appeared and disappeared like a coin trick,
spinning platters that emitted a low rumble but seemed to be utterly
stationary, and when Raszer looked to him, slack-jawed, for aid, he saw the DJ
smile, lift one hand from the turntable, and wave bye-bye, as if to a small
child. Oddly, the hand was detached from the wrist.

    
The
sense most completely disabled was Raszer’s hearing. What he did hear was very
much like what someone deafened by mortar fire would hear: the soft,
shussing
decay of sound, but none of its
initial attack. For this reason, he was not aware they had entered a stairwell
until they began to climb. With every other step, she incanted, “Okay,”
alternating with,
“
Goood
.”

    
“
Okay . . . goood . . . okay . . . goood . .
. okay . . . good. Kwaeyyees
.”

    
But
counting was beyond him. Self-awareness was beyond him. He had no body, and if
he did, it was a sealed box and he was trapped inside. Only echoes of sensation
remained, and if his circuits did fleetingly crackle back on, it was only to
stream fear to his blunted extremities. When they reached her door, he went
down like a rag doll.

    
Sszzzzt
. There was light, and the smell
of sulfur from a kitchen match. Raszer’s eyes opened; his pupils contracted
brutally, sending pain to the rear of his skull. In the match light, he
recognized her face, a thing of frightening beauty. She held a little silver
spoon, the kind given to newborn babies as a keepsake. Layla had taken off her
dress and wrapped herself loosely in a robe of deep purple silk. In the pulsing
candlelight, the arc of her breasts and her round belly flickered like magic
lantern projections, but his desire to touch her remained, for the moment, as
dead as the feeling in his limbs.

    
She had
lit the match to heat the underside of the spoon, and its contents began to
sizzle softly and release a narrow plume of fragrant smoke. She brought the
spoon to his nostrils, but Raszer kept his eyes on her, just as hers were on
him, dropping them just long enough to see that what was vaporizing in the well
of the spoon was a resinous little black ball, now partially dissolved.

    
Almost
at once, Raszer was infused with a contentment so unbounded and com-plete that
he heard himself sigh, and only then knew that his senses had been restored.
Beginning with his groin, feeling streamed back into his limbs like rivulets of
warm oil. Layla had unpinned her blue-black hair, and it half-curtained her
face. The other half reflected amber, and he realized there must be another
source of illumination.

    
In
sequence, he took note of the candle burning on a rough-hewn dining table eight
feet away, of the four posts of the bed he’d been laid on, of the pillow behind
his head, and of the fact that he had been stripped down to his shorts and was
bound to the bed with two lengths of nylon climber’s rope in a very distinctive
manner. Each rope looped around an upper thigh, biting gently into his groin,
and was then firmly tied to diagonally opposing bedposts, putting his
midsection more or less at the crosspoint of a large
X
. His arms and legs were free, but even had he been inclined to
try, he could not have shifted his center far enough to untie the knots. He
completed his survey and returned his eyes to her. The spoon was back under his
nose. It would have been pointless to hold his breath. He drew in the vapor and
became aware of her cool hand on his belly and her long fingernails just inside
the elastic band of his shorts.

    
He
glanced from side to side at the ropes binding his wrists. “What are your
intentions, Layla?”

    
“I
intend to play with you,” she said.

    
“What’d
you dope me with downstairs?”

    
“Just a
little Special K,” she replied. “I do not have patience for seductions.”

    
“Ketamine?”
he said. “Bad girl. You could have stopped my heart, and then how much fun
would I be to play with?”

    
“No, Mr.
Raszer,” she said. “I know my drugs. Now be quiet, or you will find yourself
having no fun at all.” Her nails bit into his groin, just below the scrotum.

    
“I think
I understand,” said Raszer. “Was it your handiwork that made Henry Lee a
capon?” She didn’t answer. It might have been the opium, or it might have been
some vague faith in the goodwill of the DJ spinning records downstairs, but
Raszer chose to believe this girl would not cause him harm—at least, not the
irreparable kind.

    
Layla
slipped the robe off and began to touch her breasts as a man might want to. She
traced the nipples, then moistened her finger with her tongue, slipped the
finger between her legs and proceeded to prime herself for the main event.

    
“Why
don’t you untie me, Layla . . . and let me do that?”

    
She
smiled cruelly. “No,” she said. “Enough talking.” She swung her leg over his
knees, drew his shorts firmly down to the ropes, and added, “It is fucking
time.”

    
“I see
it is,” said Raszer. “Next time, skip the pig tranquilizer and go straight to
the opium. You won’t have to work so hard on me.”

    
Layla
took firm hold of his wrists and brought her mouth down to his lazily
stiffening cock. As she did, she took brief note of the old scars and looked up
at him.

    
“I told
you,” she said, and flicked her tongue out. “I know my drugs. It will take
longer, but it will last longer, too.” She took him fully into her mouth, then
pulled back roughly. “I will make you hard. I will make you so hard you can
stab my heart.”

    
By the
time they had finished, the music downstairs had stopped. When the blood
finally left his brain and surged into his groin with orgasm, Raszer briefly
lost consciousness. That had never happened before. He guessed it was the
ketamine cocktail, or maybe the ropes against pressure points. Either way, he
must have been out for a few minutes, because when he came around, Layla was
smoking a clove cigarette and Harry Wolfe was standing over the bed with a grin
on his rubbery British face. Raszer looked down and was happy to see that the
girl had had the decency to pull up his shorts.

    
“How was
he?” Wolfe asked her, though his eyes remained on Raszer.

    
“Not bad,”
Layla answered, and exhaled a long, straight plume of smoke. “He seemed to like
. . . being tied up.” She was still naked, but unabashed.

    
“Ah-yeah,”
said Harry. “We all long to serve la Belle Dame Sans Merci.”

    
“And
you, Hakim,” said Raszer, sitting up with some difficulty. He was still bound
like a steer. “How do you serve? Directing customers upstairs?”

    
“Oh,
no,” the DJ replied. “You were a special case.” He drew over a chair, sat down,
and propped his legs on the bedstead. “You see, Mr. Raszer, we’re going to ask
a favor of you, and we thought it was only right to offer you some hospitality
first. Layla has taught me a great deal about hospitality. It’s the Arab way.”

    
“I
appreciate that,” said Raszer. “But, in that case, how about taking the ropes
off? I’d like to get my cigarettes.”

    
“Not
just yet,” said Wolfe, and scooped Raszer’s trousers off the floor. “I’ll get
them for you.” He fished out the American Spirits and lit one for Raszer, then
sat back and sighed. “Things have cooled down a bit since that night. The cops
have stopped coming around, and so—for the moment—have Layla’s old friends. The
boys are dead and the girl is gone, and for some bloody reason, ev’rybody seems
okay with that. It may not be right, but it’s okay with us, too, because—believe
me—there were a few months there when I didn’t ever think I’d make it through
the night. My crime was to play a gig and let a frightened lady come home with
me, but in the beginning, you’d have thought I’d captured fucking Helen of
Troy. I found daggers pinned to my door, had to replace my DJ rig twice, and I
even started drinking again.”

    
“I got
angry, then bloody paranoid, but I never, ever told the law that Layla was
involved with these guys, because you see, Stephan,
the girl asked me to protect her
, and after a while, I made it my
vocation. Stupid, maybe, but I’m my father’s son and he was a stubborn wanker.
Anyhow, finally, things got quiet. Your investigation is going to end all
that.”

    
The
emotion in his voice was raw and real, and by Raszer’s reckoning, Harry Wolfe
was probably as close to sincere as anyone living in Los Angeles got nowadays.
He glanced at Layla, curious to see if she was visibly moved by her knight’s
testimony. Her face wore a kind of sullen gravity, which he accepted as being
close enough to gratitude for the moment. Still, there were kinks in the story,
not the least of which was that he’d been doped, tied up, and ravished by the
tender damsel Harry Wolfe had sworn to protect. One look at the well-developed
musculature in her legs and upper arms suggested that Layla Faj-Ta’wil was far
from helpless.

    
There
were a dozen questions about the nature of their relationship, but Raszer put
them off in favor of a more pressing line of inquiry.

    
“Which
guys?” he asked Wolfe.

    
“What?”

    
“You
said you didn’t tell the police that Layla had been tied up with ‘these guys.’
I need to be clear—are we talking about the same guys who, according to the
eyewitness, killed the three boys and kidnapped Katy Endicott? The guys in the
Lincoln?”

    
“Yes,”
said Layla, exhaling a lazy plume of clove smoke.

    
“Mind
you,” Harry broke in, “we were in the dance hall. There were no witnesses,
other than—”